A Favourite Poet

Right away, I’m struggling with the brief. Perusing the collections in my bookcase I can possibly narrow it down to five. Robert Lowell, Philip Larkin, Sharon Olds, Robert Hass, Michael Donaghy, and that’s just the ones on the top shelf. Truth be told there’s not many poets I dislike, and those I do are mostly contemporaries. For those versifiers I love are either well-established or dead. Many of in which I found by chance, in anthologies like Bloodaxe’s Being Human for instance, or the Penguin Book of American Verse, all of which has led me to some wonderful finds (with the exception of Larkin all of the poets mentioned above). 

If I ever feel my poetic soul is lacking, and the muse is missing, I return to these anthologies. My go to favourite being Contemporary American Poetry edited by A.Poulin and Michael Waters. A book dating from the early nineties. My own copy which is missing a cover and defaced in marginalia is beside me currently. Each and everyone of the seventy poets included have one time or another been my favourite.

I open the book at random to rediscover a gem, C.K. Williams. An American poet who died in 2015 is the eponymous master of the long line, with a standard line being between twelve to twenty syllables. Verging on the prosaic, Williams is a plain spoken philosopher in disguise (an oxymoron I know). In the vein of his namesake and fellow New Jerseyan native William Carlos Williams his voice is simple, his poems plenty, and every inch of his stylistic voice is permeated with the tint of dread: “They are poured into the earth / like nails; move an inch, / they are driven down again. / The earth is sore with them.” 

C. K. Williams

Williams' biggest theme is suffering, especially from those outliers of society: the homeless, the dispossessed etc. He explores their plight, but shy’s away from pontificating. He is a philosopher without a system, merely content just to tell us a story. I get my narrative drive from him. 

There’s no single anthologised poem Williams is known by (maybe The Gas Station). My personal favourite being the poem She, Though from his 1993 collection Some of The Forms Of Jealousy, a twelve page epic, about a pseudo artist, and the couple they attach themselves too. It’s a poem about inspiration and sacrifice and off course jealousy. It reminds me of another blissfully bleak story in Michael Donaghy’s poem Black Ice And Rain. 

There’s nothing I can take out of context from She, Though without wrecking it, so I’m going to close my eyes turn a page and bring down my finger: 

'I’d believed that art was everything, the final resolution of all my insecu-

                rity and strivings. 

Now I realised that in attempting to create a character in art, someone who 

                would live for art, 

I’d turned away from something in myself, some lapse I hadn’t glimpsed, 

                and, more shocking still, 

I knew that architecture, poetry, and painting weren’t the self-containing 

                glories I’d imagined, 

but that they, too, could have evasions lurking in them, grievous cosmic 

                flinching from reality. 

Art wasn’t everything, nothing could be everything, but more crucially, 

                art needed you:' 

Needing art, I flip the book to another favourite.

Jamie.

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Adolescence: An Apology

When I think of the years of my adolescence I feel neither nostalgia or sentimentality. There were some good times and not so good times. There were lovers and friends lost and forgotten, places lived and left. All in quick succession. Gusto and hot air I was a hurricane, careless like only the young are allowed to be. I was lost, for those were the years before poetry, before humility.

I only started to write in my late twenties, and due to this I don’t have any Juvenilia to speak off. My juvenile poems were written on the cusp of middle age, and are far from the doe-eyed idealism of some younger poets. As a writer I was born a curmudgeon. The silent sigh of joint pain buried in every line.

In a roundabout way what I’m trying to say is: I don’t think of adolescence much, so I have barely written about it (why I chose to write about the topic is anyone’s guess). In a brazen ploy to lower expectations, I have the one poem I unearthed from a bottomless draw (don’t we all), and reading it again after all these years, I’m not ashamed to admit I recognise myself. It goes as follows:

The Lonely Models 

All those girls from the other school 

you fingered and fucked 

(their Mums too). Where they lived 

seemed an otherworldly place, 

in the part of the town I wasn’t allowed to go. 

I would watch you mime the moves 

in high pitched squeals recite your name, 

until the time came when we would see 

my Dad waiting diligently at the bottom 

of the hill, signalling tea was ready. 

He always invited you. 

You never did talk while we ate 

perfectly happy to watch the telly 

and laugh at the jokes Dad made, 

often you would stay the night 

and we would play boardgames 

whilst he washed your clothes. 

In the morning you would abscond 

to do your rounds as I went to school. 

I could only imagine what you were doing 

playing patty cake in the other estate 

with all the lonely models. 

I pictured my face on your face. 

I could never understand the reasons 

you gave for coming back, 

they were needy and nagged 

they wanted more than you could give 

if it was me I would’ve given more 

than I had stayed when they asked 

dig-down and never return. 

I’ve come back to help Dad move, 

you’re where I left you in the cul-de-sac, 

and seeing you now nothing’s changed, 

you still pretend to desire the wrong things. 

I recognise the fragility in your wave 

as I drive my Father away.

Jamie Field.

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Are Songs Poetry?

A Blogpost in Twenty Bob Dylan Albums:

 

1) Whether Bob Dylan is a poet or not we can argue until the trains come home and still be none the wiser. My question to you: Why is ‘Poet’ the benchmark? 

2) The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan roams at his own pace and actively avoids labels, sometimes he’s Poet, singer/songwriter, often The Jokerman, when he can be bothered the Rolling Stone, always the Song and Dance Man. Is it our inability to define that causes-us grief?

 

3) The Times They Are A-Changing goes without saying and so does the borders of literature. Weren’t the Troubadours musicians as well as poets? Isn’t old W.B. singing the Lake of Innisfree in that recording of his?

 

4) Another Side of Bob Dylan is author - he wrote the novel Tarantula and the award-winning Memoir - Chronicles.

 

5) Bringing it All Back Home - Bob Dylan as poetry’s gateway drug. Discuss.

 

6) On Highway 61 in the confines of Desolation Row: Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are fighting in the captain’s tower.

 

7) Blonde on Blonde 1966 - when poetry went electric. The derision of the Poet Maudits the push-back from the members in their ivory squares, Walt Whitman and the Newport Convention. If only we thought of it first. If only we had an audience.

 

8) In John Wesley Harding Dylan alludes to the Bible seventy seven-times, but also rhymes Mouse with House.

 

9) Nashville Skyline is at heart a country album. Dylan’s music is steeped in tradition whether blues, folk or country please refer to Tradition and The Individual Talent.

 

10) 1969’s Self-Portrait is a terrible album, and Dylan’s first flop, just another example that God is fallible.

 

11) The day after a Bob Dylan concert is always a New Morning, all the songs he played he changed, reminds me of Derek Mahon.

 

12) Blood on Tracks 1975 - Two of love’s greatest songs in A Simple Twist Of Fate and Tangled-Up In Blue, but whereas in a traditional sonnet, there’s an edge, space and punctuation, in a song you are blind to proportion. A Bob Dylan song often finishes when you least expect it and always goes on for too long. 

13) I have a Desire to treat Dylan’s words as verse. I know I shouldn’t but then again why is Allen Ginsberg standing in the corner? 

14) Music sets the context as well as the tempo. It is the Mercy of the music that eases us into the lyrics, you cannot divorce the two. Why would you? 

15) Good As He’s Been To You - Dylan’s voice has the ability to mangle words into rhymes the reader is unable to, leaving one dizzy and confused. 

16) Like a Slow Train Coming headlong, see him approach the monocle with the Odyssey under his arm: ‘But it’s not literature.’ ‘What is?’ I say. 

17) In the book Visions and Sin by the Infidel Christopher Ricks; Ricks brings Dylan into the academy and deconstructs. I’m grateful it exists but I have to admit, it is akin to listening Dylan live singing Blowing in the Wind. Painful and excruciating to read, makes you pine for the original. 

18) Love and Theft - whether Bobby Zimmerman stole his name from the Welsh Bard is a red herring to get us literary types hyped up over nothing. 

19) You thought the World Gone Wrong when Dylan won the Nobel Prize. 

20) Throw your Norton out the cannon, settle for the Best of Bob Dylan, it might not be literature as we define it but it’s great song-writing nevertheless, and as the lines between mediums continue to blur take pleasure in the words of this pioneer. Who knows you might learn something.

Jamie Field

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Silence

Silence comes naturally to me. Suffering from hearing problems since birth, silence is a life-long companion. After my hearing was first fixed in late adolescence the world seemed extraordinarily loud to me and admittedly I struggled to acclimatise for the first few years, preferring to bury my right ear into my shoulder (still do) whilst reading so I can concentrate. I found the inane trivia of public conversation hard to take, also I couldn’t quite comprehend why everyone was shouting at each other all the time.

But here’s the thing. For the first few years after the operation I thought my hearing was comparable to everyone else’s. In fact I was/am still classed as deaf. At that time it was 50 - 60 percent diminished compared to my peers (it has gradually worsened over the years to 30-40), which was a complete shock because it meant the world is a lot louder than I perceived it to be and this scared me no end.

It still makes me wonder how people can get anything done and why isn’t everyone else bleeding from their ears. Even now I can’t go outside wearing my hearing aid because the sensations of life are just way too much. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective, things being in the ear of the beholder and all.  Being deaf makes me conversely more perceptible to noise because I am naturally inclined to silence. I have never identified as being a deaf person because it has never prevented me from living my life, and in some ways has enhanced it.

One day as sure as anything my hearing will revert back to its original state and the air will be still once again. There’s a lot of stuff I’m surely going to miss, music being number one, the myriad of voices in my life of family and friends, but overall I’m not that worried. Like something repeated I’ve been through it before and moreover I will still have poetry. Rhythm has always been internal in that regard, I can always count the beat with my feet, and even though I won’t be able to hear the thud, I can in my bones.

When the barbaric gawp of the world has died               

I still have the solace of the rhythm in my mind.            

Jamie Field

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Altered State Of Flow

When I chose the topic of Altered States I instantly thought of getting high. Then I realised I no longer carried the disposition or the connect saving me the trouble. Then I thought back to my days at university, Mary Jane was a frequent visitor then. During the winter she was a permanent resident, not once did I see my mates not enveloped in a haze of smoke. Admittedly I did partake a few times but I never stayed for long, I had stuff to do, an exam to revise for, friends to meet, souls to save etc.
 
Now why am I telling you this? Am I high now? Am I going through the stoner’s motion of rambling from one topic to another? Here’s the point, the green stuff makes you sluggish and dims the mind, so when I hear a writer announce he wrote this particular masterpiece under the influence, skeptical is me.
 
The Beats, those purveyors of cool, ‘the angel headed hipsters’, setting the world to right, not a single back upright, were the great exponents of the altered state if only to shake their own United States out of dull conformity. But knowing their work you started to see the dedicated writers they were, the Ginsbergs, the Burroughs, the Kerouacs were sober enough some of the time to craft some fine words (for the sake of brevity I’m going to open the discussion to include other intoxicants). Admittedly the Moloch section of Ginsberg’s Howl was written through a fog, and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch composed with a litany of illegal substances coursing through his veins, and Kerouac’s On the Road gusting forth proportionate to the amount of pills good old Jack just popped. But have you ever read extracts from the first draft of these fine works? A mess of mixed metaphors and circular reasoning. Yes, On the Road was written in three days, but  they fail to mention it took months of editing and re-writes before it became the novel we know it today. Naked Lunch is on par with Ulysses for it’s pain in the arse-ness to read.  And what about the 'Moloch' section of Howl, I’ll give you that but admittedly it’s the weakest part of that poem.
 
Alcohol is probably the worse offender of talent killing. A writer’s proficiency corresponds indirectly to the amount of alcohol consumed. I normally stop writing after the second pint and prefer to leer at the bar maid for the rest of my stay, notepad plain. So many great writers have been laid to waist by the demon sauce, Berryman, Lowell, Hemingway, Faulkner, Cheever, Chandler, Carver (all the C’s). Dylan Thomas the Welsh bard killed himself drinking eighteen straight whiskeys (although I think that’s a myth myself), and keep in mind all the poems we know him for were written stone sober in a shed, under the stern gaze of his long suffering wife Caitlin.
 
Psychedelics open our minds, on the marvels of LSD, Magic Mushrooms and their ilk I have spent many a Summer day in their company, and have filled notebook after notebook with insights into the universe. Unfortunately I cannot tell you any of those insights, or tell how long God’s beard is. My writing is intelligible at the best of time and after a trip my notepad looks like a Jackson Pollock painting. The bits I manage to decipher are so pedestrian and cliche I feel like I’m reading the scrip to Eastenders. However unlike alcohol which is friend of forgetting, the memory of your trip on psychedelics lasts potentially for a lifetime, so you can always tap that reservoir if needed. Although few and far between are those times.
 
Here’s the crux my fellow travellers. There’s nothing greater than the Altered State of Flow, that non- substance-induced state of writing when you feel in absolute control. Unaware of the passing of time, the words flow almost without thought, like they have been gifted from up on high, potentially woven into God’s beard. And up to the time when you are awakened from your trance by a car alarm or the kids running into the room, you are one with the verse/the universe. It is the greatest rush more than any stimulated high, better than weed, alcohol, or a twelve hour trip to nirvana, the feeling of completion. That final full stop and the feeling of a good job done, nothing beats the rush. This is why I write, give me that anytime.
 
Jamie 

 

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