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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. 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 second poem, Police Divers on Regent's Canal is an attempt to take formal structures from after Modernism, and after the early century expriements of Pound and the Imagists; those rythms used by poets such as Robert Frost, and 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 - because this is where I think postmodernism has led us: back to form but with a brutally honest nod to our current world weary selves. Also because many writers reject form but do not necessarily do so with a defined reason. |
Short Stories
The Song Fishers - in progress
Product Placement
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 accurate - it 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 sic-casm. These two shorts are some of the attempts.
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Comedy Sketches
How not to get a sketch on BBC radio or anwyhere else for ten fucking years:
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
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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...
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