One Revolution

In January this year The Lumière Reader's creative writing page published my sort-of story 'The Kick Inside'. This was the first time words written during my quest for a million words were published outside of this blog.

Now, to close out 2008, I have three poems (all written during '08) over at Lumière. Go symmetry!

This comes close on the heels of my poem 'Himalyan White' appearing in Turbine 08.

Hold on a minute. Poetry was never in my plans this year.

But looking back, the signs were there early on that a change was coming.

On the 19th of Jan I had already owned up to writing poetry when my primary objective was Novel A. At that stage poetry was primarily a rebellion: when faced with a blank page, writing 'poetry' (blather with line breaks) could fill the space without having to worry about quality or the chances it would be published -- because I had zero expectations.

But around the same time, my interest in reading poetry was revived. I tackled Paul Muldoon's 'Sillyhow Stride' (on the pretense of being a Warren Zevon fan). The Best NZ Poems 2007 arrived at the end of March when I was getting NZ Lit withdrawal, then I dove into Best Scottish Poems to compare and contrast.

My experiment for the month of April evolved not only into one poem, but a technique which yielded dozens more. ('Josephine', which appears on Lumière, began life as The Tragically Hip's 'Goodnight Josephine' [video below], and 'Himalyan White' was inspired by mangled translations of Procul Harem's 'Whiter Shade of Pale' and The Moody Blues' 'Nights in White Satin', though it piggybacks off my Bhutan research for the perpetually abandoned Novel A).



And then I went to the Scottish Poetry library for the first time, and the second, and the third...

I can't see myself ever becoming more than a dabbler in poetry, which is still more than I envisioned at the start of 2008. But the ability to write something complete in a day holds a strong appeal while surrounded by works-in-progress (or works-on-hold). And, thanks to the internet, to be able to unleash these dabbles upon the world provides the ever-needed reminder that there are readers out there, and writing isn't always an elaborate form of self-flagellation.

The Expanding Sidebar

Is it wrong to like Monday mornings? Perhaps "like" is the wrong word, but normally all it takes is a read through of the results of the NFL's late games to make the walk to work (and what follows) tolerable. Tuesday is okay too, since there's the box score from Monday Night Football to read (and the mental arithmetic to see if I've won my fantasy football matchups), but after that, the week seems to drag.

This particular Monday morning was even more tolerable as I received emails from Blackmail Press and Turbine informing me I'd had poems accepted for publication.

[This will be the third consecutive year I've appeared in Turbine; each time for a different form of writing: novel excerpt, short fiction and poetry. Not that I'm claiming to be any sort of triple threat. Actually, I had non-fiction included in Turbine 06 as well, so if anything, I'm a quadruple threat! *cough* ]

The difficulty is that now I have to write two bio notes without sounding like a plonker. I guess I could send the same note to both... but I kind of enjoy writing them. It sure beats receiving a rejection email and deciding whether to resend, rewrite, or abandon a piece of writing.

In an unrelated note: Blog Visitors...

The leaves are turning
Time to write another Autumn poem

The leaves are falling
Sit and watch; wait for a simile

The leaves have fallen
Better luck next year

Status Report: Week Forty

Week Forty – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 12,007 words
Average: 1,715 words per day (compared to 2,529 last week)
Most productive day: Tuesday 30 September, 3,660 words
Least productive day: Saturday 4 October, 283 words
Year-to-date: 629,784 words (132,511 words behind target)

Last week was a down week, no denying. There are plenty of things at which I can point my finger, both mental and physical, but it felt as if something else, something less definable, was enveloping everything. Here’s my attempt to put it into a graph:

It’s the grey ring that’s the real problem. I’ve called it Cyclic Intangibles because I feel it is part of a cycle. At a writing high (see Week 35), it feels as if the planets have aligned. I have time and space to write. Everything feels settled. I have motivation, perhaps a specific, achievable goal. But there’s something more. As if planets really have aligned and all that astrology carry-on is the business. As if there really are muses. As if the universe wants me to write!

At the lows (see Week Forty), it feels as if the universe thinks writing is a monumental waste of time. As if, just to spite me, the transit of Venus is messing with my Feng Shui and all that carry-on is the business. In a low the obstacles to writing are more than the sum of the constraints on your time and energy. On top of everything -- or more correctly, surrounding everything -- is a fine mist of ugh. Trying to write (meaningfully, purposefully) in a low feels like Saturn trying to burst through its own rings of ice and dust.

But for some reason, I can write poetry whilst surrounded by a ring of ugh. *Brief pause to consult first pie chart.* I think this is because poetry is used to being surrounded.

SCENE: Half a dozen squad cars pull into a motel carpark, sirens blaring. Novels and DVDs and Playstation Games get out of the squad cars, guns drawn, and encircle a single sheet of browning paper. A ghost-written James Patterson Novel with a megaphone: “Alright, Poetry, we have you surrounded.”

But poetry doesn’t care if it’s in a parking lot or juvi. It doesn’t seek to capture the universe. Instead it withdraws to its safe place and captures the inside of the turtle’s shell. Inside this shell there’s no thoughts about publishing (I’m such a rookie poet it’s not funny), and certainly not making money (not even the Galapagos Tortoises of poetry can manage to live on verse alone). Inside the turtle’s shell, it’s dark. For prose, I am constantly trying to build a big enough fire to see my way through the darkness. With poetry, I am happy to sit and wait for my eyes to adjust. Slowly pin-pricks will appear. There is, it turns out, a universe within that turtle shell.

That is my overly poetic mixed metaphorical explanation of the number 12,007.

I am not going to abandon Novel B. It’s just a low. These things are cyclic. In five weeks, I’ll be high on words, the muses will communicate by RSS feed, the planets will slow their orbits in awe, and, for the cherry on top, I’ll get something accepted for an online journal I had forgotten I submitted to. But first, I need a good night’s sleep!

Worksheet #2

It is two days since we went to the Tattoo and our shoes are still drying…

***

I just sent away a bio note for an online publication (not naming names, but it wouldn’t take much sleuthing once the new edition appears):

Craig Cliff was born in Palmerston North and currently lives in Edinburgh; since the beginning of the Scottish summer he has purchased three umbrellas.

I sent the submission on the 7th of April, 2007. For the non-mathematicians: that’s a fifteen and a half month wait for acceptance.

***

Edinburgh #3

We clutter under the sun
but the mourning will continue—
some things never arrive.

***

The lock on our front door has been temperamental this week. Some days it takes two minutes of jiggling to get the key right in. This morning I got home after another free reading at the Book Festival (Gee Williams read a story called ‘Hiatus’) to find my downstairs neighbour jiggling. We had a wee chat as he jiggled. The woman who lives above me arrived back with a newspaper and a coffee. The man kept jingling. He asked if I wanted to try. I did. We got in, eventually.

***

What does the above have to do with the weather? Well, I figured out why the key goes in fine some days, and is a bugger the next: rain. That is, if it’s raining, no problems. If it’s dry, good luck getting in. I’ll leave it to the chemists among us to explain the hows and whys. But I think the lock is trying to tell us something: It’s not raining, so what the F- - - are you doing going inside!

Five Things I Like Right Now

I feel like all I've been doing lately is talk about things I haven't liked. So here's five things I'm liking right now:

1. Boxer by The National

I downloaded a couple of Best of 2007 mixes in December which is how I came across 'Mistaken For Strangers'. I liked the song whenever it popped up on iTunes, but when it began popping in my head of its own accord it starting to take notice. Still, I didn't get around to owning the entire album until about a month ago (after seeing yet another National song on SwissToni's list of earworms). I listened through the album once. Then straight through again. In the first week I listened to it seven times. Now the playcount is pushing twenty. The strength of Boxer is its restraint. Musically and vocally, the tracks are subdued; no track is longer than 4:29 (the terrific closer, ‘Gospel’). Matt Berninger’s lyrics are like the highlights of a conversation or a dream - - every time you listen there's a new gem to notice: (Ada don’t stay in the lake too long / it lives alone and it barely knows you…). Forgive me if you went through this a year ago, but if you still haven't listened to this album, I highly recommend it.

2. Kurt Vonnegut

I currently have three more KV novels out of the library (Hocus Pocus, Mother Night, and Galapagos). These will take the tally to six read this year. There will come a time when there are no new Vonnegut books for me to read, and I will be sad. He's probably the reason I am putting off re-re-re-starting Novel A... I just can't get close to that voice.

3. 'The Dinner Party' by Joshua Ferris

The term 'New Yorker Short Story' has almost become synonymous with boring, but Ferris' effort manages to entertain (while still staying within conservative boundaries). Has bumped 'And Then We Came To The End' back to the top of my To Be Read pile. After Mother Night and Galapagos of course.

4. BBC's Olympic Coverage

There will be at least three (normally four) freeview channels showing the games at any one time. The coverage has a British focus, which is only fair - - but even if there weren't any Brits in the rowing, I'm sure I'd be able to catch the kiwis step up in the finals (fingers crossed). In a related moan, I can't watch video highlights on TVNZ's website because I'm not in NZ - - something to do with broadcast rights. We all know there's a whole New Zealand's worth of Kiwis living abroad, and the internet is probably their only hope of seeing Tall Ferns highlights or whatever. Surely something to sort out before London 2012.

Oh, I forgot about being positive. I guess I'm a curmudgeon at heart.

5. Candle Hat by Billy Collins

Just now I thought: ‘What about a poem?’, and this was the one that sprung to mind. Questions About Angels is in my recent batch of borrowings from the Scottish Poetry Library... I might have chosen something by Dennis Brutus if more of his poems had titles!

Status Report: Week Twenty-Nine

Week Twenty-Nine – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 17,598 words (more than I wrote in the previous two weeks combined)

Average: 2,514 words per day (compared to target of 3,001/day)

Most productive day: Saturday 19 July, 3,609 words

Least productive day: Tuesday 15 July, 948 words

Year-to-date: 477,996 words (73,916 words behind target)

Expect Status Reports to appear on Mondays from here on out.

I used to draft up the blog entry last thing on a Sunday evening, tally the words (as they counted towards the week I was reporting on), then finalise all the stats and graphs... but I've finally tired of the jiggery-pokery. I'm all for streamlining these days.

Perhaps poetry is to blame...

I went to the Scottish Poetry Library for the second time on Saturday. My first visit coincided with some uni students being given a tour -- I felt like and interloper, and ended up loping out without borrowing a single book.

But on my second visit I had the place pretty much to myself.

And what a wonderful place! (Though I will say it does have a terribly squeaky floor for a building less than a decade old...)

It is run by an ex-pat Kiwi, and thanks to a deal struck with Creative New Zealand (and the donations of a few visiting Kiwi poets) the Scottish Poetry Library has a wonderful collection of contemporary New Zealand poetry. I mean, they have eight books by Geoff Cochrane (he's quickly becoming my favourite NZ poet). Having been out of Aotearoa since 2006, it was the first chance I've had to read so many of these books. [Admission: I hadn't read most of those released before 2006 either, so...].

I spent a couple of hours sitting at a table and reading through books by Jenny Bornholdt, James Brown, Glenn Colquhoun, and Mr. Cochrane... and still had to limit myself to borrowing four books of NZ poetry, as I needed to use my final two loans for something more Scottish.

I have the books for a month, but I suspect I'll be revisiting the SPL (not to be confused with the Scottish Premier League) sooner than that.

It's no coincidence that my sudden passion for poetry corresponds to a larger chunk of last weeks pie being expended in pursuit of the p-word. And for all the 5,614 words, I did manage to wind up with seven poems I’m happy with. How many I’ll be happy with when I read them again in two or three months time, well, that’s the real test.

I don't see this as a conversion to poetry. I've always dabbled. And I'm not writing any less prose / thinking any less about narratives. It’s just I’m getting quicker at spotting the sorts of things that can only work as a poem, rather than trying to force them into prose.

As I've pushed myself give every idea a fair chance at making it to the page, I've realised that ideas are a renewable resource. If you chop down ten, another ten will grow. And if you don't harvest them, you're unlikely to get much new growth from year to year.

Maybe a better (worse) metaphor is shaving your legs. Once you start to shave (so I'm told), the hairs grown back thicker and more plentiful, which makes not shaving worse than if you had never started shaving in the first place. So too with writing. If you start to use your ideas, new, thicker, hardier ideas will take their place. If you stop using the ideas, they won't settle back down, but throb away in your skull. Once you start to blacken the white page, you never go back. Or something like that.

the bungled mechanics of memory;

in its eyes: the documents it has lost

The Fern and The Thistle

This from the latest International Institute of Modern Letters’ newsletter:

A press release from the Scottish Poetry Library:

New Zealand is about as far as it’s possible to get from Scotland. Yet there are strong cultural links between the two nations, and a new initiative is bringing them together online.

Organised by the Scottish Poetry Library, The Fern and The Thistle will feature writers based in Scotland introducing their favourite New Zealand poets. The SPL hopes this will evolve into a poetry exchange, giving New Zealand readers the chance to discover Scottish poets in their turn.

As well as discovering New Zealand poetry online, Scottish readers will be able to borrow some of the best contemporary New Zealand poetry ­– the Scottish Poetry Library has recently acquired a new collection of over 60 books, thanks to funding from Creative New Zealand, and will be adding to this collection over the next few years.

The Fern and The Thistle will be launched with a live reading from Scottish and New Zealand poets Andrew Johnston and Gerrie Fellows, at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh (29 May) and New Zealand House in London (28 May).

There are probably only a handful of people who receive the Wellington-based IIML’s newsletter in a position to pop along to the Scottish Poetry Library on a Thursday evening in late May… and I’m one.

Bless.

I have been dipping in and out of the Scottish version of Best Poems 2007 ever since I read and blogged about the NZ version.

The truth is, I wasn’t grabbed by any of the poems in Scotland’s 2007 edition. I think this is purely a reflection of the editor’s taste and mine not meshing. That’s fine. I’ve started going back through previous years (well, I’m halfway through ’06) and already I feel like I’ll be coming home from the Scottish Poetry Library with more than NZ writers.

One area I feel prepared to make a comparison (and the inevitable value judgement) in regards to NZ vs Scottish Best Poems is the additional material. When you click on a poem from the contents page of the NZ site you get the poem, plenty of space, and links to an ‘Author’s Note’ and ‘Sources’. The Author’s Notes are generally brief, incorporating a few lines from the poet regarding the chosen poem – a glimpse inside the process rather than a historiography.

This layout achieves two things. It puts the poems in pride of place. And it acknowledges that this is a jumping off point for readers hoping to discover more about NZ poetry and/or find a new favourite poet, and equips readers with the knowledge to find more by the author.

When you click on a poem on the Scottish site, you get it all on one page. First there’s the poem, then scroll down a little and there’s the source, then an ‘Author’s Note’ (which almost always exceeds the size of the poem itself). After more scrolling (some of these Author’s Notes are looong), there’s an ‘Editor’s Comment’, then ‘Biography’ (of the poet, not the editor), though if you scroll down some more… no, just some Related Links.

Phew.

The problem with all this extra information is the poem invariably gets dwarfed by this other information. This is most pronounced on the page for Leonard McDermid’s poem, ‘Night River’. The poem is 21 words long. The Extras run to 693 words.

Too often information is repeated in the Author’s and Editor’s comments, and some of the poets – perhaps giddy at the freedom of prose and no word limit (?) – over-explain their own work. Rather than illuminate, these long notes threaten to extinguish the wonder and mystery of the poems.

Look back again at the NZ site. For the Author’s Note to my favourite poem of the bunch we geta one-line bio of Geoff Cochrane, then:

Cochrane comments: ‘The “Nigel” of the poem is the novelist Nigel Cox, author of Tarzan Presley.

New Zealand is a place of beaches and bays; Nigel did his dying within a stone’s throw of the sea, and I thought that sane and smart. His remarks about writing (his writer’s takes on writing) are also sane and smart – some of the smartest ever made.’

That’s what I mean by illuminating. That’s what I mean by not extinguishing wonder and mystery.

Perhaps this is overstating things.

What about: It's like the build up and post mortem of a football match: a little might be enlightening, but too much and it’s tedious.

I’m not bagging out the Scottish poems, just observing that the layout and peripherals of the NZ site do a better job of highlighting poems and poets worthy of further exploration.

The 2006 edition of the Best Scottish Poems shares the all-in-one-page format and includes editor’s comments, but it’s all a lot more succinct. I like the poems more in this edition (so far), but I think this is mostly due to my tastes being closer to Janice Galloway’s (2006 editor) than Alan Spence’s (2007 editor).

If I ever wind up unemployed in 2008 (and not shackled to my desk, chasing insane daily word count targets) I fancy holing myself up at the SPL and coming up with my own list for 2008.

The SPL also stocks NZ poetry, so I'll probably have two lists to compile. Before I started reading the Scottish edition, I thought I could maybe eek out a few generalisations about poetry in one or t’other country based on their 'Best' sites, but as Janice Galloway says in her 07 introduction:

On comparing these collections to draw national conculsions: In this age of ready translation, international web access and mass publication, poetry need have no nationality… Whatever the hell we like enters our thinking and motivation as writers, thinkers, believers. Our truest work is to say so. The poets here are too full of other things, wider things. More humane, more humble and yet more confident things. More thrawn things. Here's to that.

Yes, here’s to that.

Translation - April Experiment #1

As I alluded to in my wrap up of my March Experiment, I was thinking of doing something with translation next.

What brought this on was a short story I wrote with a Spanish main character. I showed it to some writer friends and a few questioned the language. They wanted the English of the 3rd person narrator simplified, so there was less of a gulf between narrator and main character. I didn’t really agree with their reasoning, but figured it was worth trying the story with a Beginner’s English narration.

To do this, I tried the expedient of translation the first paragraph into Spanish using an online translator, then translating the Spanish back to English. The result was clunky, as expected. Lots of extra bits—the, of, he, in, at—appeared, but surprisingly, the internet could manage “stalk” (cazar al acecho) and “so-and-so” (fulano).

Anyway, I gave up on the idea of translating my whole story into Spanish and back, since it would mostly add a lot of articles and prepositions, and I’d end up going back to my original word choices. But I could see some utility in this technique.

The key, I think, is to start with someone else’s words.

Today I heard Jorge Calderón’s version of Keep Me In Your Heart (written by Warren Zevon and Jorge Calderón; originally performed by Zevon on The Wind) as I walked home from work. This was the final track on Zevon’s final album. You can press play and listen while you read the rest of this post if you'd like to:

This line really got to me:

Sometimes when you're doing simple things around the house
Maybe you'll think of me and smile

When I got home (after checking my email, reading some blogs, and setting my fantasy basketball lineups), I read over the lyrics, and cut and paste the lines above, and two more couplets into my online translator. These other lines were:

If I leave you it doesn't mean I love you any less
Keep me in your heart for awhile

There's a train leaving nightly called when all is said and done
Keep me in your heart for awhile

I then translated these six lines into Spanish then back to English then into French then into English then into German then into English then into Italian then into English then into Dutch then into English then into Portuguese then into English then into Russian then into English. I would have gone further if my online translator had more languages.

The final version was a bit of a garble:

When I it negligence, that I they, that want, do not wish to tell for end outside, that me tratterrebbe in their one heart

From time during the correct moment then they simple things where also probably it has made houses, tornou-se-me and its smile hung up

It leads to a train which it has told good-bye rather nocha which I have, I am appointed, when all have told and become - directly in its heart small me deteve

It was a bit strange that some words could be translated into Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, but not back into English, but that's machines for you.

The tone was really set by the first translation (French), so I tried starting with Russian and it went somewhere slightly different...

After a few more iterations, I had a stockpile of 1,200 words of translations of the three original couplets. The clunkiness of the translator cursed any couplet from being completely comprehensible, but also blessed me with some interesting phrases which seemed in the spirit of the original text (and song), but unique in their own right. I then copied and pasted every interesting phrase into a new document, culled and crimped, until I ended up with a poem.

A poem? I don’t know what I thought I was doing this whole time, but I didn’t begin with the intention of writing a 44 word poem (small mercy: this swollen blog entry counts towards my word count).

But that’s what happened.

Here it is:

Translation
After Warren Zevon

when all I said becomes a small
heart—
I am named

*

the simple things within the house
that you make of me:

the dependable action in this heart

*

I am appointed

when all have told and become
is hung to a smile

What do you think? I like it. But then I tend to like poems tinged with death (see Tuesday’s post). Good thing I’m not a full-time poet—there might be some slit wrists in the cheap seats.

Best NZ Poems 2007

I’ve been reading two or three poems a day from the best NZ poems 2007, which was released online at the end of last month.

I have now read them all.

One person’s list of 25 poems (2007’s editor was Paula Green) will vary wildly from another person’s list, and anyone sitting down with the express purpose of writing one of 2008’s “best poems” is bound for disappointment. (Although… we know that James Brown will be 2008’s editor, and we can read his list of his ten favourite NZ poetry books here and… no, don’t even go there.)

What I wanted to say was poetry—and writing in general—is very subjective, and anything with “best” in the title needs quotation marks (and footnotes, and apologetic noises in the foreword…), but bringing work together like this provides a great taster of a year in NZ poetry. Sure, some names appear every other year (are they Bedrock or Deadwood? that’s your call), but to an international audience (as the internet permits the anthology to reach) the names are secondary to the poems. Where else these days but the internet can you expect to discover a favourite author/actor/musician/designer through their work first, then backtrack to the biographical (soundbite-worthy) stuff?

I don’t profess to have read every poem published by a NZer in 2007, but my two favourites from Paula Green’s list (in reverse order) were:

‘Sandwiches’ by Elizabeth Smither

“When my father died we ate sandwiches…” the poem begins -- a “You had me at hello” moment, though for me, it was toast. And that final image of the skirt striding ahead, “bolder than my feet,” is a cracker.

‘Chemotherapy’ by Geoff Cochrane

On a first reading I knew this poem would stay with me for a long time. The image of the dying man blowing out an unlit candle. The economy words (the title does a lot of work), and their textures. “The wind-minced sea”, which is a strangely violent phrase to begin with, appears bruised when it reappears in the last line… ah!

You could probably extrapolate a few things about my taste in poetry from the above selections. 1) I prefer shorter poems to longer ones. 2) I am drawn to poems about death.

Um, guilty on both counts, I think.

The Great White Page vs Dark Room

Earlier in the year of a million words (ahem) I wrote this poem:

The Great White Page

Were it another colour
Were it another shape
Maybe words would come

Those 16 words weren’t the biggest help for my word count, but they do capture the feeling I get when I look to the west, I mean, when I open a new word document at the end of an evening, still needing three hundred or eight hundred words to keep apace with my targets.

The fear of the Great White Page (almost as scary as being forced to read another book by Steven Hall, shudder…) has lead to this:

It’s called Dark Room. Free to download.

Simply by changing the colours and removing all the toolbars from sight, this wee program has tricked me several times this week into forgetting about everything but what I’m working on.

It reminds me of my youth, too. Of DOS and those IBM clones that schools could suddenly afford in 1990, and were finally junked in 1996 (me and five others were given the job of disposing of an entire classroom full of these cream-coloured wonders in third form… good times… perhaps there’s a story in this?).

I imagine it’s similar to how people of a (slightly) older generation feel about typewriters, or pen and paper.

Me, I can’t imagine writing fiction on anything that required you to type out everything again when you made any changes. I guess you’d chose your words more wisely in the first place. Labour over them. Not that I don’t labour over mine (the fiction words more than these bloggy words). Just that the labour comes in waves: birth, first examination, alteration, second examination, death, rebirth…

Anyway, just wanted to share my Dark Room discovery.

Footnote:

In looking for a good version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for the link above, I found this. Classic.

Writing Poetry Instead

It’s dirty little secret time.

I’ve been writing poetry instead of powering ahead with the enigmatically named Novel A (it has a real name, I’m just being cagey in my weekly updates).

Of course, poetry alone is not enough to keep up with the targets, so I’ve plodded away at short stories, long short stories and memoir-ish stuff not fit for the light of day. But generally, I’ve been in a funk for the last string of days. The word counts are there or thereabouts, but it’s a slog.

Except for poetry that is. Even if it’s very straight forward, prose-like poetry (see example below), it seems less like work. It’s a bit worrying that I’m sick of writing sentences about made up stuff this early on, but… Well, there is no But. It’s worrying.

I think the thing holding me back from working on Novel A is that I badly want to get it published. Publication is also the ultimate aim with the short stories I write, but the obvious difference is: it’s a lot less work, blood, sweat and teas (not a typo, I’m a chain tea-drinker all of a sudden) to finish a story than a novel. It’s easier to accept a story being filed away than a novel.

This is the voice of experience. I have two novel-sized manuscripts filed away. They are in the back of my head when I work on Novel A. It’s worse because Novel A bares a striking resemblances to one of the failed & filed manuscripts.

It feels sometimes like I’m one of those foolhardy restaurateurs frittering money away until Gordon Ramsay comes along to save the day. Except, I’m one of those ones who go back to making the same mistakes when F---ing Gordon and the F---ing cameras leave and there’s this quaint epilogue at the end of the episode: Novel A was filed away two months later.

Anyway, there’s a glimpse into my neuroses.

They come and go.

I think it’s worse now that I’m working and have so long to think about writing whilst not writing (I did filing all Thursday and Friday and feel a “Tips for Temps and Employers” entry coming on).

Here’s a poem I wrote which kind of needs to be posted on the internet for it to operate as it hopes it might.

Condolence

I heard your mother died

but the message had passed

through too many mouths

for me to feel comfortable going

straight to you with condolences.

Words are frail but they are all

some of us have –

limited by physical or emotional distance.

Some, like me, cannot even send the words

to you direct,

we must file them away

or fire them out into the atmosphere

and imagine – for it is only in the

imagination that this could work –

that these words will one day reach you

when the pain has faded

but not the memories

and these words will not remind you of pain or sadness

but just that other people were thinking of you

in that time of pain and sadness.

Falling Flat: Forced Reference in Paul Muldoon’s ‘Sillyhow Stride’

i

I came across Paul Muldoon’s elegy for Warren Zevon, ‘Sillyhow Stride’, as a Warren Zevon fan first, a reader of poetry second. This is kind of like a pottery expert seeking out ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ or a scuba enthusiast reading ‘Diving the Wreck’. Niche interests are seldom catered to by poetry because poems and poets tend to have other things on their minds.

And so it was with ‘Sillyhow Stride’.

What drew me to the poem – the references to Zevon, especially his songs – were, in fact, the parts I enjoyed least.

When I read Paul Muldoon poems in the past, I often felt like I knew too little to appreciate fully what was going on.

Reading ‘Sillyhow Stride’, there were still moments where I felt ignorant, but, when the song references started to pile on top of one another, I actually felt like I knew too much.

The poem abounds with references, but here are just a few:

that excitable hula-hula boy

(reference to the songs ‘Excitable Boy’ and ‘The Hula Hula Boys’)

all those years of running amuck in Kent

(lifts lyrics from ‘Werewolves of London’)

you tipped the scales
for the Everly Brothers,

Frank and Jesse, while learning to inhale
through a French inhaler

(reference to ‘Frank and Jesse James’ and ‘The French Inhaler’)

And my reaction to these references: cringe.

For me, renaming Don and Phil Everly as Frank and Jesse to echo Zevon’s ballad of the wild west outlaws is a contrivance. Perhaps Muldoon’s whole poem is a contrivance, I simply am not clued in enough to get all the references to 42nd Street and diacetylmorphine.

It is this tension between knowing too much and not knowing nearly enough which tainted my first few excursions into ‘Sillyhow Stride’.

But is my cringe reaction a valid reading of the poem? And why am I cringing?

ii

The following was an ad featured under ‘Sillyhow Stride’ as it appeared on the website of the Times Literary Supplement:

Choosing a religion.

Which religion should I choose to believe in?

www.peace-of-mind.net

The ad is funny taken in isolation: the way believing a religion is made to sound like having car insurance. (Then again, not all of us have cars...)

But it is also comic in the context it appears. I suspect readers of the TLS, readers of Muldoon’s poetry, and/or admirers of Warren Zevon are not the easiest people to usher into religion with a handy pick-one-and-be-done-with-it website.

But you can forgive ‘Ads by Google’ for throwing up www.peace-of-mind.net when faced with a page featuring the phrases:

dragging a full-length cross… on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Such a pilgrimage … the blood-bath / at my Twin Towers… our mother’s death from this same cancer… as Christ broke with Iscariot… in the afternoon, televangelists, / push up and bench press with Buddhist and Parsi… the Everlasting Life we bargain… your Russian Jewish father…your Scottish Mormon mother…

Indeed, the other two ads at the bottom of the page (as it appeared for me) seem much more tangential:

* an ad for “Horse and Rider Performance Analysis” (presumably because ‘Sillyhow Stride’ comes from Muldoon’s 2006 collection: Horse Latitudes); and

* an ad for Bad Drawn Boy’s new single, ‘The Time of the Times’.

It has always been easier to get laughs with the unintended. The funniest home videos, the Freudian slips of newsreaders, watching your mother learn to ski. Some movies – I’m looking at you, post-1990 Jackie Chan – I have endured purely for the promise of the outtakes at the end.

And it was the same intentions that I signed up for Google’s AdSense on this blog. Before I even had content, I had ads. This was not, and will never be, a pecuniary measure (no one has ever clicked an ad – why would they when it would mean tearing themselves away from my riveting discussion of word counts?). I was simply curious what sort of ads my ramblings would call forth.

Sometimes the ads on the top right have been mildly amusing, but it has mostly been the sort of ‘Get Your Novel Published’ ads which always make me feel like I'm discussing writing with my mother.

Aside: I fear I may be contravening the terms of my AdSense contract by discussing this, like talking about the future after a one-night stand will doom a relationship. But I guess that’s my policy: if something is going to do me in, it might as well be my own words.

There are deep thinkers out there who describe laughter as a response to the perception of incongruity. While this doesn’t cover contagious laughter or the fact babies laugh before they can speak, it does explain the little chuckle I get from incongruous ads thrown up by well meaning machines.

The thing is though, the incongruity must appear incidental, otherwise, the response is not to laugh but to cringe. This is why great comic writing is harder, and infinitely rarer, than great serious writing.

iii

As someone reading ‘Sillyhow Stride’ for references to Warren Zevon songs, it is no wonder they fall flat. I’m expecting them. And when they come, often they feel random. Like I am reading Google’s first foray into poetry.

The references do not appear seamless because they are surrounded by flashing lights. Some of this is my own fault, but some if it is Paul Muldoon’s.

I feel okay pointing the finger at Muldoon for the ‘excitable hula-hula boy’ type references because he illustrates elsewhere in ‘Sillyhow Stride’ that he can weave Zevon references into his poem in an unobtrusive and enriching way.

As a rule, the Zevon references work best when they are set lower in the mix.

The young John Donne who sets a Glock
on his dish in the cafeteria

(A reference to the image of the inside cover of Excitable Boy, though it was actually Zevon's .44-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver resting on a dinner plate filled with his wife's cooking…)

Or

realized it ain’t

that pretty, ain’t that pretty at all
to be completely wasted when you’re testing your chops, hint hint,

on a Gibson Les Paul
overdriven through a Fender Vibratone,
ain’t that pretty to crawl

to Ensenada for methadone.

Here, a Zevon song title and refrain (‘Ain’t That Pretty At All’), is worked into a powerful passage which, in its spirit and content, echoes Zevon’s own oeuvre: the humour and pathos of an addict-drunk.

The reader is not being asked to compare Phil and Don Everly (the brothers responsible for ‘Wake Up Little Suzy’) with Frank and Jesse James; nor are they bombarded with two song references in one line (“excitable hula-hula boy”).

The conversational nature of ‘ain’t that pretty at all’ probably makes it easier for this reference to appear seamless in contrast to others. Indeed, it’s hard enough to work Hula-Hula or French Inhaler into conversation, let alone a piece of serious poetry, but let us not forget: Warren Zevon is the (immortal) king of the implausible lyric.

In ‘Play It All Night Long’ he manages to cram incest, cancer and another name for undulant fever into the second verse.

Daddy's doing Sister Sally
Grandma's dying of cancer now
The cattle all have brucellosis
We'll get through somehow

Then, to close the third and final stanza, Zevon manages to transform the scatological into a timeless epigram:

There ain't much to country living
Sweat, piss, jizz and blood

Of course, Zevon has the benefit of music and his own delivery behind these words as they are presented in their intended form (1980’s Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School), whereas Muldoon’s elegy must live and die on the page.

iv

In researching this piece, I came across a discussion of Muldoon’s poem on the bulletin board at Warren Zevon’s website. The fact the bulletin board is still alive and kicking today is, in itself, a testament to the enduring appeal to Zevon’s songs, while the educated dissection of the non-Zevonian references in the ‘Sillyhow Stride’ thread is testament to the intelligence of his fanbase.

The discussion is notable for a total lack of criticism of ‘Sillyhow Stride’. Either no one else felt let down by the 'excitable hula-hula boy' insertions, or they didn't feel it was important enough to put into words.

While I have taken the time to try and pin-point the 'what' and the 'why' of my cringe response, I agree that it is wrong to dismiss this poem as a failed joke. It is clearly more than that.

There is the fact it is an elegy addressed to Zevon – someone Muldoon knew personally and professionally, co-writing many songs with him, including the title track on My Ride’s Here – and here I am, someone who only discovered Zevon’s music after his death.

But this is the nature of elegiac form: the turning out of the private for the unknown reader to remember that which they never experienced.

In terms of elegy, ‘Sillyhow Stride’ succeeds on many counts. It is at times powerful, hypnotic, poetic, heart-rending and appropriately inappropriate.

Without the pressure of squeezing in a song title, Muldoon turns several brilliant phrases to evoke the tragic side of the musician:

…that dank
spot on the outskirts
of Jerusalem where the kids still squeeze between the tanks

to suck the life out of a cigarette

Reading ‘Sillyhow Stride’ aloud - giving Muldoon the same odds as Zevon with his musical backing - there are moments of brilliance, like the blend of pathos and aural pleasure in:

I knelt beside my sister’s bed, Warren, the valleys and the peaks
of the EKGs, the crepusculine X-rays,
the out-of-date blister-packs

When, at the poem’s mid-point, Muldoon writes, “The flesh, Warren, is but a bruise on the soul,” the poem reaches its zenith, but this phrase could equally excuse, in epigrammatical form, the poem’s failures. The flesh of this elegy may not always work – the odd reference may be clumsy or Google-esque – but ultimately, the spirit is there.

I just have to swallow my inner pedant and believe.