What a poem can do

 

 

I’ve been reading more of Daniel Bailey’s Hallelujah Giant Space Wolf – in awe and excitement at what poems can do.

 

How language can be made as uncanny as a flower, an oxblood stem, a neon red burst, an epiphany between yourself and a fuddled pane of glass.

 

How reading a poem can make you want it to be Spring, to run down a great green slope with your arms out (not singing The Hills Are Alive…, but perhaps thinking of some other song you like better).

 

If there was a scale of poetic melancholy feeling that ran from noted miserabilist Philip Larkin to let’s say, Frank O’Hara in a good mood, Bailey would be firmly at the O’Hara end, digging furiously for even more of that good blue air. Here’s one of the poems I particularly liked (Mr Bailey, if you are reading this, I hope you don’t mind how much I post of it, it’s just really so wonderful. Fangirl sharing):

 

SWORDFIGHT ON THE COUNT OF 3 OK…3

 

I’m sorry. I just tricked you by starting at three

don’t worry so much that I tricked you, instead, worry

that you have a stab-wound in your belly and you are leaking

blood all over the ground. again, I am sorry

 

keep in mind that

this is a special moment in our relationship

because I get to see what your insides are made of

 

they’re so beautiful

I never would’ve guessed

your blood would be so fragrant and musical

it’s like harmonicas in the alley

behind the soup kitchen

 

you’re still mad at me

I can tell by the way you are stabbing me

 

this is not good. it hurts

it’s like arctic waters diving into me

with the hurt. we are both bent over, bleeding

everything inside spilling out

 

[...]

 

we should lie down

 

this is better,

lying on the ground like this

 

[...]

 

how long do we have to live? three minutes?

maybe two? however long, I don’t care

this all hurts so much, but I’m glad

that I’m hurting with you in this way

 

[...]

 

ok

 

come here. I want to hold you

 

what, you can’t move either?

 

it hurts too much?

 

I know, I know

 

swordfighting was a bad idea

whose idea was it anyway?

mine? oh right. I forgot

 

 

(((((((((((((((((((((

&&&(((((((((((((%%%%%%%%%%%

(-))))))))))))))*((((((((((((((

((((((((((((((((&&&%%%%%%%%@
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)))))))))))))))))))

 

I don’t know what just happened

I think I just blacked out a little

 

oh, you’re dead now?

ok, I’ll see you soon

 

And really, this is all you can ask of a poem. That it runs you off over the hills, into the trees and over the moor, towards some idea of a setting sun, or rising, whichever. If you’d like more, Bailey’s Tumblr is here.

Mundane bones livid heart

 

Editing yesterday, and trying to disassociate myself from the words, which have become hard like soap, and tasteless. I feel like a discount Midas right now. But a good tactic I’ve found is to pick up an author, not necessarily one I am overly fond of, and to read a few pages before turning to my own. Someone who writes and thinks very differently from me is helpful. Murakami’s 1Q84, which I’ve been shaking my head over (so explain-y, so repetitive, so addicted to the cliffhanger chapter ending)  but also hoovering up – it is enough to jolt me out of my usual tendencies, and therefore my usual mistakes. It clears the text a little, reminding me that I do, perhaps sometimes, need to set out what is happening and why, rather than always making the reader act as archeologist brushing at my dust.

 

Here is the other side of being a writer, I tell myself. We cannot read Proust all the time (though I haven’t read my Proust in quite a while. Too many other more urgent, exciting books in the way). The thing is, I have always been a huge snob when it comes to reading. I find it very hard not to be. This only applies to fiction, not books of theory (which I struggle with and give up on far more than someone with a PhD in English Lit should really admit to). I only want to read the best, that is, the most ambitious and enchanting and devastating novels. I want to get lost in swamps of words and carry those perfect, glassy iceblocks of prose around to wonder at – but. I also have to learn to write clearer myself, thinner, if need be.

 

If I want to acquire more techniques, I need to be able to learn from multiple sources. And not just books that strive in different ways (1Q84 a kind of giant jellybean souffle that I would never normally want to imitate). I need to drink cups of artificially flavoured hazelnut coffee and remember the punch of coffee from roadside gas stations as D and I drove through the American heartlands. I need to sip weird combinations of teas. Take risks on picking up unusual things as well as the usual, the popular, that I often discard. This does not mean I’m going to start watching Strictly Come Dancing. There are limits. I just need to listen to how people really speak, or how they speak when they are bad actors. I need to watch silly TV dramas and eavesdrop more. I need to sit in company.

 

I went to see Alasdair Gray reading from his collection, All the Short Stories, and was startled to find how direct and simple and yet effective his works were. I need to learn these sorts of skills. To be brave is also to approach the everyday without the defenses of dismissal. Frightening stuff. If I can learn to refine, then that will not mean I must always take something out of my words. That I must always dispel the pretty mist that hangs about them. I can make the choice to keep it in. But it might mean that, sometimes. The acquisition of a sharper, less precious eye. It might mean mundane bones and cheap fabrics. If that’s what’s needed to set the semi-magical, semi-flesh heart beating.

Back to the Village

Christmas is over, Boxing Day is done, and the flat is still strewn with tinsel, many surfaces padded with cards, and the fridge full of rich left-overs to be munched when appetite returns.

So, time to resume where I left off, in the beautiful St Mawes.

Looking out over the rooftops, towards the inlet

It is really such a lovely place, cluttered up streets tucking in on themselves, tiny houses tressed in ivy and climbing plants, and those subtropical species that seem to endure quite well on the mild westerly coast of the UK.

A pink cottage with palm trees leaning in close

A thatched house on the road up to the castle

Ye Olde Petrol Pumps

It has been so well preserved I think because of its location, at the tip end of the Roseland peninsula. Hard to get to by car, along those single-track roads (hairpin bends, obscured further by high hedgerows), the quickest way to get there is by special chain-boat ferry.

The Ferry, decked out for Christmas (I love the little man watching over the cars)

The ferry leaves from a small hamlet with the docking point, that wonderfully appears on the map under the name of King Harry Ferry. As you can see, it’s more of a flat platform, and is ported across the river Fal by the use of chains, rather than an engine on the boat itself.

Despite the small difficulties of getting there, the village (or perhaps it is a town) doesn’t feel isolated or in any way dead, even in the depths of winter.

All the cottages have names, some descriptive of those who used to live there, others a bit fanciful (like 'Pirate cottage') and then there was this one

This cottage has a pretty sensible name, considering its location..

...quite close to this, the Holy Well of St Mawes (dating from around the 6th Century, and sadly locked behind this tiny door)

I really wanted to open the door and peer down into the well underneath. A grotto of ferns around a dark, stone pool – or perhaps less impressive, and better imagined than seen.

With all these sights to fire the mind, I plan to start back later today on the draft of The Millennial, hoping to bring something of the spark of the place into Aida’s memories, to wind the ivy and the smell of salt air around her (inland, American) loneliness.

Out of Context

In New York City, in any city, there are a lot of spaces in which to communicate a particular message. A billboard on the road to the Queensborough Bridge; a sticker posted on a ‘walk’ sign; a face in chalk, or a hundred faces, as is sometimes to be found in Union Square, for reasons I have yet to discover. What is interesting is when some of these images are removed from their locales, their meanings can alter. These, for example:

An Informative sign that lends the subway an air of existential dread.

Contra, this one cries out an affirmation -"Live, Disregard the previous sign!"

And if I told you what this was for, would you believe me? It's on a newspaper booth in East Midtown, and is one in a series of handwritten mysteries, all promoting the wonders of the New York Lottery.

I suppose my thoughtful point was to do with the choice and placement of phrases, identifiers of culture and class, and indeed the choice and placement of ‘foreign’ characters (by dint of national or chronological origin) in The Book of the Alter.  The English, homesick Aida as consciously foreign, the Lowery/Coronada family as unfamiliar territory to me etc., and something to do with how I worry about the validity and success (at this early stage) of my efforts.

Really, it’s an excuse to post some amusing pictures I took.

The First Book

I have sent out Kilea, the first book I wrote, like noah did his wee dove across the waters; across the city of New York, to agents and interested friends.

Actually the first book I wrote was when I was ten, in a hardcover exercise book. It was called ‘Kyle the Lamb’, and was a bildungsroman of a lamb (named after the Kyle of Lochalsh, which cuts between Skye and the mainland) who wishes to leave his safe home under an overhang of ling roots to visit the big city and seek his fortune. He and a friend, Hamish the Highland Cow, make the journey, but become separated by fate, and as I remember, both are caught and butchered for fast food meat. There were illustrations, more despairing than grim.

I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever write a sweet story where all is spun sugar and light. Probably not.

The Desert to One from the Land of Rain

Why the desert?

It has had a magical appeal for me, ever since I made the trip to Hay, New South Wales with my boyfriend (now husband). That’s me, above, in 2006.

It was the Easter weekend. We started driving out of Sydney . No destination in mind, except The Outback, or what we believed it to be.  Along the way trying and failing to see herds of kangaroo. Only sheep, as the land became drier, and night fell. Then a strange delusion: I started to think there was water, on both sides of the road. It was the shimmer of the moon on the dust. We were passing over a long bridge, without end, over the inland sea that so many Europeans also believed must exist.

We stopped in the dark; the milky way visible as it can only be in the purest skies. The Southern Cross there too, signalling we were not home, but far from it. My boyfriend drove us onwards, until we saw signs for Hay. After some hassle and much stranger-kindness (a local wedding having filled nearly every hotel in the small place), we found a bed for the night , and the next day drove out for One Tree, a spot on the map at the crossing point of three desert highways.

One Tree Hotel, or what remains of it. Nothing for miles but the roads out, a few signs.

This was what we found at the spot marked One Tree; a former wayside rest for how many bleached, hot, irritable travelers? I wanted to go in, expected that the hotel would still be open, and finally that there would be some way to get in, to know more, but this was all we were given. Beer cans and space.

Then, on the way home, (or the way there…memory is hazy except on this point) another burst of strangeness:

A water-hole (man made, perhaps for sheep, or cattle, who could no longer live there in the terrible drought) and in the water, a flock of Pelicans. We got out of the car and walked over; already they were overhead, circling. Waterbirds, in the desert. hundreds of miles inland. There was the Murray River not so far off, but still, in this flat, dun landscape, they were an unexpected wonder.  Perhaps they lived on the invisible sea that I had seen.

The desert is haunting. For someone from a small, rainy, hilly country, it is impossible  to fathom. Surely just over the horizon, it ends? It doesn’t. The sky so big, the heat so much. The emptiness so all encompassing, that you realise your smallness and finality in a way that cannot be done in a city or peaceful garden.  In a clap of wings and blinding light.

That’s what I want to get at again.