|
Poetry
I had been experimenting with directly autobiographical material on London Metropolitan University's creative writing course. My first reaction to a module 'Fiction and Autobiography' was to think 'I will now spend three months, once a week, going home on the 271 asking myself: 'what did I say that for'?"
What happened was something else. I had been reading Milton's Paradise Lost for another essay and I just didn't get it. Why is this deemed so powerful? I kept reading. And kept reading: and then I heard his voice. The voice of a man blind, imprisoned, bereaved, all causes fought now lost and then this strange resonance rising from history. Then I got it: poetry can enter your mind in one shot, at the point of sound, like a continuous note on the ear - and if it does so it is trying to tell you who you are; the core of yourself. This is the 'voice'. Pay attention to it. If you want to encourage it and out it on your own doorstep, then the path to follow is quite simple and the lesson is certainly not in the library of London Metropolitan University of any others: always write what you are most afraid of.
Back to the Wall is an experiment in sound and willingness to write my own personal demons. Because I heard the poem before I 'wrote' it, is is styled for performance.
The other poems, are an attempt to take formal structures from after Modernism, after the early century experiments of Pound and the Imagists who opposed artifice for its own sake and who were wary of the threat of iambic pentameter running on and on to little effect. But I still love those iambic sonorities of poets such as Robert Frost, and therefore it feels right to play it ambiguously; asking the formal to carry a more contemporary mundance cynicism, to simultaneously reinforce and undermine the use of formal structure, always threatening to over use the beat of iambic penatameter but hopefully drawing back. I think many writers reject form but do not necessarily do so with a defined reason and this is not as successful as rejecting form because you have learnt it and moved away. |
Poetry cont.>>
New! How they Speak
A week may be a long time in politics but it is not in poetry. I have started to come to terms with and look back, years later, to the loss of my parents and the childhood memories this involves. I tried denying this for about twelve years. What happens if you attempt this is that the external environment starts talking back to you. There is no escape from this journey. A series of poems has suddenly emerged from this: 'How they Speak'.
What I am interested in here is writing in sequence - so that there is a sense of the loss emerging, memories rising from the silence of a room, the process of understanding it, coming to terms with roots or in my case a distinct lack of them. Admittedly I've always liked a good psychological navel gaze. So 'they' are at first the inanimate or the natural world provoking memory and the need to face up, and eventually of course, 'they' emerge in the poems as those who are lost.
I have to say, at the risk of sounding like people who say 'I've been to India and Africa but never been to me'...(shoot them) that transformation is taking place.
These examples are from this process:
How the Sand Speaks
How the Chimney Speaks
How the Ashes Speak
How the Grass Speaks
Comedy Sketches
How not to get a sketch on BBC radio or anwyhere else for ten fucking years:
|
Short Stories
New ! The Song Fishers - I've finally finished a draft which is down to the editing stage. I once read that Francis Ford Coppola sometimes begins a film script only with one strong visual image and expands by experiment. Bastard. I ended up with 10 000 words. But I kept going and what was challenging in writing without a pre-emptive structure, was the job of constraining the story and characters to a world. In other words if you leave one single possibility that they 'can just walk out the room' because you've left a loophole then the whole thing crashes. I think I've just about managed to close all the doors. Its easier if you plan in advance but then again sometimes you can't suppress a vision. Just because its difficult doesn't mean its not interesting.
Product Placement - I changed the ending in this one. I had the two characters kill each other off in the first version and despite that not sounding so terribly amateurish in the context I had created, it was still highly unsatisfactory. A lesson in 'less is more'. And it always is.
I've been continuing this idea of 'voice' but this time into prose: I had just read Toni Morison's Jazz. It made me think of Irvine Welsh, Robbie Burns and fishing tales which hold the attention. These examples bring to their colloquialiasm, a unique technical accuracy - whether this is accurately describing heroin use and the peripherals entailed, or an intimate knowledge of an era, or fishing tackle, the voice achieved is enhanced and made all the more powerful because the language is has authority and weight. Try an experiment - read the poem 'The Second Coming' by William Butler Yeats. Without consulting references - do you know what a gyre is in the first line of the first stanza? On first reading it does not matter, precisely because the overall effect of the language is to have authority; the ear trusts it.
This was especially interesting as, and this is probably typical of Yeats, the technicality of the language is drawn from an adapted, esoteric, mythical landscape of his own making.
All of the above fell into place on reading one other strong voice, now sadly passed away: Octavia Bulter. One of the most striking science fiction and literary voices I have come across, in part because the future is so close a comment on the present, the fiction is always insightful.
Eventually I could not help but begin an experiment of my own; cyber satire or sci-casm. These two shorts are some of the attempts.
Contact Tantrum
I am always looking for writing work, not just comedy and fiction. I check the following in-boxes regularly if anybody wants to get in touch:
editorial@eveningbogstandard.com
moonlight@eveningbogstandard.com
|
Articles
No Sex and The City
Pike Dreams
I see a lot of articles in the mainstream press which contextualise themselves as the maverick viewpoint only to cosily reinforce the most catch-all common denominators of experience. I have never been that interested in agreeing with everybody, in fact most times I would say the proposition is downright dangerous. I note that accurate cynicism and a more challening style seems to be moving increasingly into corporate and technical articles, especially on-line media. It is as if mainstream media has lost trust in our X-Factor times that somebody out there has ideas rather than merely a desire to kiss ass. By this I mean the Rolling Stones would not have emerged from the X Factor because they had ideas of their own.
This No Sex and the City article was my attempt to put the honesty back in. Nobody was interested except me.
I don't have an excuse for Pike Dreams; it is pure indulgence and appears soon in a book to be published by editor Graham Ellis of Angling Experience. I should maybe's check the title of that book at some point...
|