I feel quite cheated that tomorrow isn’t a bank holiday. I presume you’re the same, or are you chomping at the bit to get back to work? Nah, didn’t think so.
I found myself asking why earlier in the week. Not the standard existential crisis, but I was asking why in relation to a call I saw from a guest editor of a journal for more prose poems. They had nearly filled the magazine and asked for more prose poems. I have nothing against prose poems—I know they boil the piss of many a poet, but not me. I have read and enjoyed many—that said one escapes me right now, but what I wondered was why it had to be prose poems to fill the space? It seemed so prescriptive. I meant to ask, but found myself wondering how it would come across. I think I must have been distracted by work as it then became too late to go back and ask. It’s certainly too late to ask now, and perhaps it’s just a taste thing, perhaps I’ve missed something in the call for submissions, perhaps it just doesn’t matter.
I’m not going to write an impassioned defence of prose poems here..largely because I don’t know enough to do such a thing, and because a) I suspect it’s been done better elsewhere and b) because I suspect that it wouldn’t change the mind of a non-fan anyway.
I wrote in a review last week, and this could be lazy reviewing, that the poems were constructed of all lower case, mainly long lines with little to no punctuation. I did quote extensively, but I also added that the reader is probably able to picture poetry like this, and no matter what I say about the poems cover, the subjects, someone who is anti this kind of poetry is going to be unmoved by it. And that’s fine. It’s a broad church after all.
Did I have a point to make here? No, I don’t think I did. I’m tired. Our most excellent cats decided 1am was the perfect time to bring in a mouse and start flinging it around outside our bedroom door like a game of hackeysack. Coincidentally, 1am was the time R woke me up to tell me to deal with this. Three times I got up to capture the poor mouse and release it outside. 3 times the bloody cats brought it back in, although they’d finally killed it (I suspect more through terror than biting)…
This morning, R and I went to Kemptown Antiques fair, and the planes were flying low over the various stalls of bric, brac and outright crap. And as for 6 quid for a bacon baguette, well the less said the better. Anyhoo, back to the planes, I thought of this tweet as the planes rumbled (barely) overhead. I can’t vouch for the number of perverts there, but statistically speaking there must have been at least one.
I spent the rest of my time wandering around trying to find something there to connect to the poem for this week. Shall we just have the poem, and then I’ll explain myself.
The ghosts regret joining a self-help group
The ghosts have started to believe they don’t fit in.
They used to see their reflection in shop windows
and think themselves too fat, too old,
too thin? – now they don’t see anything.
People behave as if they’re not there;
the ghosts get cross but then realise – they’re not.
They think of moving to a tower by the sea
where the only compass point is North
and their minds would be soothed by the buffeting wind.
Punched by the absurdity of death
the ghosts wonder why they never recognised
how they could have lived the life they had.
They used to go to classes to be taken out of themselves
but now they’d give anything to be put back in.
+++++++++++++++++
Taken from A Separate Appointment, New Walk Editions, 2022. Published with the author’s permission. Have a review from The Friday Poem too.
My thanks to Rebecca Farmer for her permission to publish this. And I note this is the second week in a row that I’ve put something up here from the New Walk stable. I bought this book and William’s at the same, and having started William’s the week before it only seemed fair to start on Rebecca’s.
I knew her work from her Smith Doorstop pamphlet, Not Really, so it was a no-brainer when the chance to buy her new one in a bundle with William’s came up. And it’s interesting to see how this new pamphlet continues and builds on some of the themes of Not Really. The poems about her father and the ghosts we met in the first pamphlet are now the main focus of A Separate Appointment. I may be imagining this, and it would take a far deeper study, but it seems to me like the ghosts are starting to doubt themselves more as they get older. Do ghosts get older? Either way, as the poem above suggests, they’re questioning some of their life decisions. They certainly do in the above, but also in the ‘The ghosts are concerned they might not be relevant’ from earlier in ASA.
I spent a lot of the time walking round the antiques fair trying to find something that would connect this poem to the week, as is my usual wont, but nothing leapt out at me. Perhaps I was being too literal. I’d imagine a place where the stalls are laden with the spoils of hundreds of house-clearances and the like must be over-flowing with ghosts. I will note, however—and this is weak/tenuous at best, but R did mention moving to look after a lighthouse on the way home, so was she thinking of “moving to a tower by the sea / where the only compass point is north”? (NB I commend Tony Parker’s Lighthouse to you).
I did see this. And if I was the only person to see this…Hang on, it’s all going a bit Sixth Sense.
But this poem has nothing to do with any of that. It’s more akin to— AND SPOILER ALERT OF SORTS IF YOU’VE NOT SEEN THE LAST EPISODE OF SUCCESSION, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED—what Kendall Roy says in the last episode of Succession from earlier this week, ‘Carpe the Diem, people’.
I wonder if poetry is the Succession of the creative world. It provokes very strong feelings, it is filled with excellent writing, everyone* has an opinion on it, but very few people consume it. I am, of course, making this up as I go along.
* Lots of people, it’s never everyone whenever anyone says everyone. They usually mean the people they know. I don’t here, but everyone knows what I mean.
A Song that is in some vague way linked to something
THE LAST WEEK IN STATS
HEALTH STATS
23K running. Better, inc another 9K. Getting better
3 days without cigarettes…
0 days since drinking.
LIFE STATS
1 cancelled train having just rushed for it
1 living room full of teenage girls “camping”
2 poet signed up for launch, 1 maybe
1 trip to an antiques fair
1 walk with my wife
4 focus groups
More paint-stripping
1 more week that I’m not having an affair with Eva Green
POET STATS
1 loose ideas/articles gathered (this allows me to kid myself I am writing all the time)
0 poems finished:
0 poems worked on: Designated Driver
0 poems committed to the reject pile
0 submissions: North
0 withdrawal:
0 acceptances:
0 Longlisting:
0 readings:
0 rejections: Magma Competiton
18 poems are currently out for submission. No simultaneous subs
83 Published poems
Reviews
0 review finished:
0 reviews started:
0 review submitted:
2 reviews to write:
READ/SEEN/HEARD/ETC
Music
r= Radio, A = Audiobook, P=Podcast. The rest is music
Monday
Triptides: Starlight
The Soup Dragons: Hotwired
Tuesday
The Archers
Laura Cannell: Antiphony of the Trees
Dropsonde Playlist
Weds
Scout Niblett: Sweet Heart Fever
A Man Called Adam: The Girl With A Hole in Her Heart
Radiohead: In Rainbows, Hail To The Thief
Thurs
Radiohead: King of Limbs, Kid A, Moon Shaped Pool
Sparks: The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte, Halfnelson
Ultramarine: Send & Return
The National; First Two Pages of Frankenstein
Porton Porton Lopez: Ice Cream Soufi
The Jesus Lizard: Liar
Friday
Gabrielle Hasler: Patterns
Cowboy Junkies: Such Ferocious Beauty
Sarabeth Tucek: Joan of All
Bark Psychosis: SCUM
The Teardrop Explodes: Kilimanjaro, Wilder, Everybody Wants to Shag the Teardrop Explodes
Tall Ships: Everything Touching
Saturday
The Archers
Lanterns of the Lake: Versions of Us
The National: First Two Pages of Frankenstein
Sunday
The Go-Betweens: Tallulah
The Go-Team: Get Up Sequences Part 2
The National: First Two Pages of Frankenstein
Read
John Clare:Selected Poems
Genevieve Carver: Landsick
Butchers’s Dog 18
Watched
Masterchef
Ted Lasso
Succession
Scandal (Watching R&F watching it)
Barry
The Last of Us
Ordered/Bought
Ironing board cover
Arrived
Ironing board cover
Butchers Dog 18
Strix 9
Wear The Fox Hat 
Pingback: Poetry Blog Digest 2023, Week 22 – Via Negativa
Thanks Mat. Great poem.
Sent with Proton Mail secure email.