How Dare you Write Poetry!
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| Shelley |
I’ve written on this subject before, but today I gathered an extra follower on Twitter, and he’s a successful performance poet, so I reckoned it was time to re-examine my dilemma.
By the literary ‘powers that be’ (in particular, in Nottinghamshire), I’ve been designated not as a proper author as such, but as a ‘Jobbing Writer’. Not time served, but the kind of literary hack equivalent to the bloke who isn’t really a plasterer, joiner or a bricklayer, yet he knows his way around the shelves at B&Q. That ‘Jobbing Writer’ tag means never being taken seriously. All the celebrated genres, literary fiction especially, are closed off.
I’m a wordsmith who has, until recently, made a living through any commission which dropped into my inbox. Local press columns, CD and DVD sleeve notes, rock and roll tour brochures, magazine features, PR work, TV holiday show scripts, even the copy for an annual garden furniture catalogue. My mission statement? If it needs words and pays a fair fee, I’ll do it. Survival rules. Not exactly Martin Amis then, a long way from Will Self or Ian McEwan. Sure, I’ve written novels. Two in fact, one even supported by an Arts Council Literature grant, but no-one is liable to read them. Once you stray over the well-defined border between bona fide publishing houses and the no-man’s land of self-publication, unless you’re extremely lucky, your writing career can be said to be over. You’ve exchanged what scant respect, experience and expertise it took decades to accrue to don the mantle of the irritating literary amateur.
I’m no genius, nor am I likely to be remembered for my words. Yet I often think of poor Van Gogh, never selling a painting, but soldiering on, simply because his life had become an irrepressible artistic impulse. Or Melville, whose Moby-Dickwas trashed by critics, only to be discovered for the masterpiece it is decades after his death. As this Jobbing Writer I’m not in any literary league worthy of note. So why bother to sit here 10 hours per day, even days per week, writing? In his great work Why I Write, George Orwell gave four reasons for writing:
(i) Sheer egoism.
(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm.
(iii) Historical impulse.
(iv) Political purpose.
They’ll do for me. Only age and infirmity will stop me writing. I’m doing it right now - look! And although I’m this unsophisticated hack, in recent years I’ve rushed uninvited into the most preciously guarded enclave of them all; Poetry. I bought Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled and realised that I knew nothing about Iambic pentameter, the villanelle, sonnets, etc. etc. I thought a haiku was a Japanese kipper. As a would-be poet I realised I was out of my depth. If I took this on, I’d be as popular as a pork pie at a bar-mitzvah. Yet it doesn’t matter, because I’ve listened to poets and, shock-horror - even performed live with them. In these snippets from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1821 essay, A Defence of Poetry, I managed to find some consolation and assuage my non-academic proletarian guilt.
“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”
“Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.”
“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”
“Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.”
“All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially.”
When my good friend, a real, award winning poet, Kevin Fegan, asked me to co-write a book of verse and prose with him, the prospect terrified me. But I did it. The result, Iron in The Blood, wasn’t (in my opinion) all that bad. Since then, I’ve produced four more volumes of poetry.
No doubt any serious critic would tear them to shreds whilst laughing bitterly, but I don’t bloody care. Whatever emotional spark ignited the inspiration of Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare or Seamus Heaney drives me. Of course, my slim volumes were never submitted to publishers, have never been reviewed (a terrifying prospect) and the only people who have copies are family and friends. Of course, you can buy them - they’re cheap, but you’d need to contact me direct. So here’s a random sample from the Jobbing Writer’s oeuvre.
Squirrel, Fox and Mole.
Here it is,
That old midnight conceit
The old crust idling
On the outskirts of his story
He has heard the wind
And braved the heartless hurricane
Stood ankle deep
In mud and snow
He has loitered in wild daybreak
At life’s bus stops
Waiting for the time to go
Here it is,
The conveyor belt
Of disenfranchised dreams
That catalogue, fat pages
Stuffed with wasted energy
Spiced with hope and longing
Where, you just might see
(Or then, perhaps you won’t)
A man who saw alternatives
A fool so bound
To wild imagination
Like a squirrel leaping
Through the branches
Of Autumnal trees
A tribute act to crows and pigeons
Yet hoping to fly free
He was the fox who hid
Beneath the hawthorn branches
And the leaves
The covert mole, snout buried
The badger, hurting none
The bat who occupied the eaves
And these disguises, down the decades
He has relied upon.