Putting Glass Babies Into The Heads Of Librarians
'Daniel Craig The Screensaver' - in the current edition of Poetry News - is running away from me like a daft, wilful toddler, out into the world. I'm not even sure if I like it anymore! I can't stand that archaic 'when I tire' in the first line. Who says that?! But now it's run off I can see, from this distance, that part of the wry humour of it - which people seem to like - comes from a clash of registers. 'When I tire', 'arms I'd die for should they ever...' and 'I vow...' all sound like they come from a saccharine Victorian love lyric. But - thankfully - I undermine this with the fashion-mag-speak of 'sky blue trunks', the American casualness of 'no big deal' and the way the last half of that line just quoted morphs into a note of threat: '... should they ever press too hard against my throat'. 'I'll kill him with one finger' reasserts that violence. Again, not very romantic. And there's a deliberate hint of implausible combat techniques there, a la Bruce Lee. The inappropriacy and exaggeration of this line (I'm just talking about pressing a key on a keyboard, after all!) is camp, and camp, of course, undermines all seriousness.
I was reading 'Serpent' at the performance workshop and Steve Carroll said it sounded almost 'Elizabethan'. There's probably some mileage in adopting these Elizabethan forms - the sonnet, blank verse - with that formal/serious/archaic feel which seems to so easily - too easily - come with them and then undermining that feel with uexpected themes, turns, vocabulary and registers. With 'Serpent' I want the poem to grow and become rhetorically and lexically more virtuosic and playful. I want it to seduce, be sinuous and lissom, like Kaa in Jungle Book, then I want it to bite the reader in the arse with some difficult, poison idea... I want it to build on that range of tones i think I might have hit upon in 'Daniel Craig'. Formal - camp - shading into sinister....
In a fit of vainglory I googled my name today and found out that 'Daniel Craig' has been nicked by an interesting website called 'Bookkake' (www.bookkake.com ) where it's been named 'Dirty Monday Poem' (!) What a cheek! Though I'm flattered, of course. And whatismore they coupled it with the original film still which inspired it. I emailed them and made contact with the editor, who seems nice...
In the same way I've also just found out that my poem 'The See-Through Tongue', published in Chroma, Issue No.3, was chosen as Poem of the Week by Cynthia Carpenter, a library assistant for the Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre, for w/c 11th Nov 2008.
The See-Through Tongue
Queueing at this African check-in desk
this moonymoany britishfucker's mono-fucking
lingual!
Gatwick-bound?
One does hope that one's ticket is
single.
Because, my friend, although we legions
of profligate babblers and heathen bunglers
can retreat to our jungles
of dipthongs, plosives and fricatives,
we can also, follow your every god-damned word perfectly.
pale-arse,
which makes you fragile
see-through.
Like these glass babies.
White-hot from the womb
the midwives wipe them
like vases.
She added the comment: 'The reason I chose this poem was because after reading it i dreamed about glass babies.' This is weird. Poems not just running off, without my knowledge, but poems jumping into other people's dream-lives. I suppose that's a poet's highest goal: having a poem, or a part of a poem, exist somehow in someone else's head.
I'm listening to the hypotic elegance of the Portico Quartet. Fabulous stuff. My ears are rapt, glowing appendages. I've just also downloaded 'The Bad Plus', jazz again, but more dissonant and gutsy, like a sexed-up Shnittke interpreting pop. God, I love music. Possibly more that poetry. But it's probably a case of being in awe of what I can't do myself. The painter Francis Bacon, whose works have sneaked into my own dreams of late, probably secretly wanted to be T.S.Eliot, on occasion. Envy is fruitful.
Highlights of 2008? The Chroma writing retreat in Devon was pivotal. It made me confident about being a Queer Poet, and made me feel like I belonged to a tribe. GFest08 recently confirmed this too, more subtly. Nottingham Stanza has become increasingly pleasurable. And Robin and I discovering Acem Meditation has also been of huge significance. I now know for sure that I have no need whatsoever of either Religion or Therapy. Not seeing Hadrian's Wall because of a low-lying fog, was a memorable, funny moment. Then seeing the Angel Of The North, defiant and improbably graceful by the motorway. There were the sunflowers in France of course, which we see every summer, but which are always stunning.
And now I'm listening to some dodgy, fans-only podcasts of various Cocteau Twins tracks, live, remixed, bootlegged... Truly I am a geek. I'm waiting for Robin to roll back from his Christmas works do, my own Angel of the North, though he doesn't belong to me, as nothing does, rolling back home through the icy streets of Nottingham....
Happy Christmas everyone, and thanks for reading... please feel free to add comments!
Richard x
