tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25420807297341360822024-03-13T23:15:01.552-07:00Notes to my Lying SelfConfessions of a writer / Confessions of a writer who wants to grow up / Confessions of a writer who wants to grow up to be a "writer"MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-12155542505865226702014-02-07T04:48:00.000-08:002014-02-07T04:48:13.007-08:00Lady Chatterley's AdmirerMost of the readers who are attracted to a blog post that refers to Lady Chatterley will have at least some awareness of the book <i>Lady Chatterley's Lover</i> by D. H. Lawrence, and the story of its publication. The book was roundly condemned in its own time as lewd, and Lawrence was forced to publish it himself and send it out to purchasers in the post. (One imagines it arriving in plain brown envelopes received sheepishly by gentlemen in quilted housecoats. Although I'd wager it was bought by as many women as men.) In spite of this unorthodox route to market (or perhaps because of it) Lawrence made more from the sale of <i>Lady Chatterley's Lover</i> than from any other work he had written.<br />
It is easy to see, or at least to imagine, what all the fuss was about. The book, first published in 1928, is replete with four letter sexual swear words that even today are taboo, and contained graphic descriptions of penetrative sex and his'n'hers orgasms. But, to me, this is largely a red herring, because the real force of the book is as a critique of the barrenness of industrial-economic life in the period after the Great War, the war that was to end all wars (or World War I as we now less optimistically call it). And in this sense, the book is an important pillar in the pantheon of formative modernist literature.<br />
I want to share with you (or remind you of, if you've already read it) a few important passages that illustrate the deep philosophical underpinnings of Lawrence's project. We can distinguish three threads of thought running through the book: the emptiness of industrial life; the sacrifice of passion to the greater god of money; and cynical, unwholesome sentimentality of some of the literature that was respected at the time. (Any page references refer to the Wordsworth Classics edition - ISBN 978-1-84022-488-7.)<br />
The first is exemplified by the following passage (page 136). It is an inner monologue voiced by Constance - Lady Chatterley - as she is driven through the English midlands:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. And the continuity is not organic, but mechanical.</blockquote>
I'll illustrate Lawrence's second theme not in his own words (well, not all of them anyway), but by way of a 'found poem', a poem that recasts the essence Lawrence's text in a new form. The original text can be found on page 266.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span id="docs-internal-guid-6b8c9c0a-0c4b-4a01-7ec9-e8425a8eae3b"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Modern Love</span></div>
<br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From </span><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lady Chatterley’s Lover</span><span style="font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by D. H. Lawrence</span></div>
<br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This great industrial population has to be fed, kept</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">going somehow. The women talk, nowadays,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more than men, more cocksure. The men are limp, </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">feel doomed, go about as if nothing can be done,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in spite of all the talk. The young are mad</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">for want of money to spend; their lives depend </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">on spending money. This, we are told, is civilisation; for this,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">we have state education: the masses reared on spending</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">until the money gives out, the pits on a two-day week,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">no better even in winter, feeding a family on a pittance; </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the mad spending goes on, and the women are the worst.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How can you tell them living is not spending? If only</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">they were taught, instead of earn and spend, to live,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">they could learn to be happy on the little they earn.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Men dressed more gaily wouldn’t think about money:</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">they could dance and hop and skip, sing and swagger,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">be handsome with little cash; and keep the women </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">amused, and be themselves amused by the women;</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">be naked and handsome; sing in a mass, and dance</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the old dances together; carve their own seats,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">weave their own emblems. But it is hopeless— </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">for they think only of spending who should not think at all.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Be alive and be frisky, worship the great god Pan.</span></div>
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Other gods are for the few, let the mass forever be pagan.</span></span></blockquote>
The third theme can be exemplified by many passages from the book, but moreover <i>the entire book</i> can be seen as an embodiment, and incarnation, of Lawrence's call for genuine feeling. This is why none of the sexual language or description in the book is in any sense gratuitous. And it is this, far more than the socio-economic arguments, that makes the book political.<br />
Constance Chatterley is married to a wealthy, landed, cripple named Clifford. Clifford occupies his time by writing popular novels that fail to attract much critical applause. As this passage (page 53) shows, Clifford is frustrated by this lack of recognition:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Clifford, of course, had still many childish taboos and fetishes. He wanted to be thought 'really good', which was all cock-a-hoopy nonsense. What was really good was what actually caught on. It was no good being really good and getting left with it. It seemed as if most of the 'really good' men just missed the bus. After all you only lived one life, and if you missed the bus, you were just left on the pavement, along with the rest of the failures.</blockquote>
Later (page 170) Clifford discusses literature with Constance:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'Have you ever read Proust?' he asked her.<br />'I've tried, but he bores me.'<br />'He's really very extraordinary.'<br />'Possibly! But he bores me: all that sophistication! He doesn't have feelings, he only has streams of words about feelings. I'm tired of self-important mentailities.'<br />'Would you prefer self-important animalities?'<br />'Perhaps! But one might possibly get something that wasn't self-important.'<br />'Well, I like Proust's subtlety and his well-bred anarchy.'<br />'It makes you very dead really.'<br />'There speaks my evangelical little wife.'</blockquote>
How's that for a condemnation of sentimentality! I recommend reading <i>Lady Chatterley's Lover</i>, though I warn you to set aside any squeamishness - very few books, even today, are as brutally honest as this one is, or so linguistically fearless. I'll leave the last word to Lady Chatterley's lover himself, who has not been mentioned at all till now. He would describe the edifice of literature, and the society that has given rise to it, as just so much clatfart. Oh, go look it up!<br />
<br />
<br />MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-28137160355055851142014-01-30T01:38:00.000-08:002014-01-30T01:38:53.131-08:00Toxic SentimentEmpathy is extraordinarily powerful. We see someone else's joy or suffering, and we feel in ourselves joy or suffering in sympathy with them. We are hard-wired to be moved to either share the other person's joy or to help relieve their suffering, and it is of little consequence whether the other person is a friend or a total stranger. Scientists have identified mirror neurons in the brains of humans and other primates. Our social instincts, those on which our societies and culture are founded, owe their existence to this biological adaptation. And unless you are a sociopath, empathy is as inescapable as eating and breathing.<div>
What could possibly be wrong in that? Well, for a start, empathy leads us up a whole lot of wrong moral paths if we follow it blindly. You see a little girl crying because she has dropped the change she was carrying home to her mother down the drain; your heart goes out to her, and you pull a note out of your wallet and press it into her hand, telling her, "there, there, no one need know you lost it". Your action is spontaneous and totally selfless; she's a stranger, she doesn't know your name, you're unlikely ever to meet her again. And you walk on, somewhat pleased with yourself, past the woman rattling a charity can in aid of the homeless and starving victims of another Asian typhoon.</div>
<div>
We are wired up to respond to immediate suffering, not to statistics. We don't suffer half as much reading of hundreds or thousands of death in a newspaper, as we do when we see someone we know crying. Empathy is unwilled, immediate, and has nothing to do with making sound moral choices.</div>
<div>
It also has nothing to do with the emotional impact of fiction. A recent long-running story-line in a UK TV soap concerned a married couple, in which the woman had a terminal illness and wished to end her life voluntarily; her husband opposed her, partly, we must suppose, because he loved her and wanted to keep her around as long as he could. Let's not question the rights or wrongs of the characters' choices - they're only fictional, after all; rather, let's look at the way the story was served up to the viewing public.</div>
<div>
The actors went to town with their escalating facial agonies; medieval wailing widows could learn a thing or two about emotional excesses from these two; their performances were positively Biblical. And all of it was shown in close up. The result is obvious: viewers saw all the tears and chest-beating and felt enormous empathy, their mirror neurons lighting up like the Coca-Cola Christmas convoy. Tears were wept. Some viewers even offered to help!</div>
<div>
What is wrong with this picture? What, apart from people wanting to help characters who don't even exist?</div>
<div>
Well, from a fiction-writing viewpoint, just about everything. Empathy may be an effective way to keep TV audiences hooked to a show so that you can raise the price of advertising slots (which, lest we forget, is the function of soap operas), but let's take a look at what emotional response was elicited. Did the viewer who cried at the husband's desperate attempts to keep his wife alive actually <i>feel</i> his anguish? Did the viewer whose heart broke when he accepted the need to let his wife go <i>feel</i> his sadness? No, they did not; they simply felt moved - mechanically, manipulated - by the portrayals of anguish and sorrow, but they felt nothing - <i>nothing at all</i> - of what the characters might be supposed to be feeling.</div>
<div>
This is the fundamental difference between fiction - good fiction, whether literary or cinematic - and life: fiction gives us, the audience, an opportunity to vicariously experience someone else's life<i> from the inside, as if living it</i>. The novel does this <i>par excellence</i>, but it is possible to do it too through drama - the awards given to great actors, such as Olivier, de Niro and Depp, or to great directors, like Polanski, were hard-won and richly deserved. They forego the cheap and easy use of crude expressions in favour of character development by means of layered motivation. For only when we can think as a character thinks can we feel as they feel. In the case of the soaps, it is doubtful even the actors felt real emotion. It's probably beyond their pay grade.</div>
<div>
So, both as a writer and as a consumer of fiction, eschew sentimentality and seek instead to walk in strangers' shoes. Sentimentality is toxic to fiction because the empathy it evokes is utterly empty.</div>
MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-61161062614033371362013-09-24T13:02:00.000-07:002013-09-24T13:02:08.530-07:00In Memory of Archie Hickmott<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: -1.5pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Albert Hickmott, the little boy of Union Street, grew up to become the great man we all knew as Archie. Or as Uncle Bert. Or as Dad. As quiet and unassuming a man as you will even meet: get caught up in the drama of the day and you could easily miss him, sitting a little way off either with his nose in a book — a paperback thriller probably — or looking on with an enigmatic smile.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: -1.5pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 21.75pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Archie liked to tell stories, when he got the chance, such as the time he watched from Dover Castle as a German battleship slipped past the English guns to pass unscathed through the Channel; or how his Uncle Jack Arnold led a Luftwaffe squadron in a deadly raid upon Detling aerodrome; or the time Vera Lynn harangued at him in the street because he had parked his articulated lorry in front of her house.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: -1.5pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 21.75pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For all his gentleness, he was a strong man until his illness robbed him of his strength. His arms and shoulders betrayed his years at the wheel of truck or a bus, wrestling them round Kentish bends long before the advent of power steering or synchromesh gearboxes. He used to say, with typical humility, that, when he started out, lorry drivers were considered the lowest class, and looked down on even by other working men. But, even in retirement, Archie could walk into any transport cafe in Britain and be recognised — and welcomed by proprietors and drivers alike.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: -1.5pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 21.75pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The First World War robbed him, eventually, of his father. He was brought up as an only child by his mother. Too young to fight in the next war—no doubt much to his mother’s relief—he worked as a driver to support the war effort. Afterwards he travelled in Europe, and fell for Paris’s charms. At the age of 25 he married Lil, a Hampshire beauty four years his junior, and together they worked and fretted and raised their four children. When Lil’s fragile health failed her, Archie sacrificed his own financial security to care for her till the end, but characteristically he did so without complaint.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: -1.5pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 21.75pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lil passed away in 1991 but Archie carried on, stoic as ever. He looked on as his children established homes and families of their own, helping as and when he could, sharing their upsets and their joys. He saw 11 grandchildren arrive and grow up, and 5 great grandchildren scattered across the land.</span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-60ed288a-518e-d143-5061-9ebe51dfa84c"></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: -1.5pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 21.75pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Archie was diagnosed with esophageal cancer last January, and was told by his doctor to expect to survive no more than six months. “I’ll take a year,” Archie said. In the end he took a year and a half, such was his strength, and sustained as he was by the loving care and selfless friendship of Carol, for which we thank her dearly. We all will miss Archie, but he deserves his rest.</span></div>
MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-7347031831601141042013-08-05T11:53:00.000-07:002013-08-05T11:53:35.674-07:00Where has all the Slush gone?I feel almost as though I should apologize for my tardiness in failing to post poems regularly onto the Slush Poetry site. Having written and shared over 150 poems in 2012, observant followers could be forgiven for thinking I had lost my creative drive in 2013. Nothing could be further from the truth.<br />
<br />
In fact, I have been very busy this year, both writing new poems and rewriting a completed novel which I hope to get into print next year if I can persuade an agent to run with it. On top of that I have been running a poetry group (the Original Poets of Clapham, London) and been very busy promoting my first poetry collection, <i>A Limited Season</i>.<br />
<br />
So where has all the poetry gone? It is true there is less of it. But if last year's frenetic production rate did anything, it allowed my poetry, through experimentation and practice, to find my poetic voice, something that would otherwise have taken far longer. And now I am able to write poems that say much more efficiently what I want to say, and say it in a voice that those closest to me would recognize at once as mine. The result is a steady flow of poems of, I think, a good and improving quality. I can take my time with them because I am confident they will mature slowly into what I want. And I am finding that the editors of literary journals recognize in the latest poems something distinctive - that is, they are accepting them much more readily than before.<br />
<br />
Which is why I am posting far fewer on the Slush Poetry site: quite simply, I want to keep my poems under wraps so that they are all the more attractive to journals and, in time, to publishers. So I apologize for sharing less, but here's what I will do: I will share all published poems once the publication they are in has been sent out. Fewer poems, but all the best ones.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, here is a small sample of my latest poem:<br />
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In snow</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-4ab4a28b-4fd0-cfa6-ceae-2edbea93ea60" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Much is explained</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">by the propensity of men</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to sign their names</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in snow</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All that lay</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">en lettres anglaises</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the dexterity of fletchers</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and other trades</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or the pleasures</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">men know...</span></div>
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-84278646181338797072013-06-05T12:39:00.000-07:002013-06-11T01:24:01.431-07:00A year of wringing hands (Part 2)In <a href="http://lyingself.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/a-year-of-wringing-hands-part-1.html" target="_blank">part one</a> I said that 'Missing the match in McDonald's', while exploring child abuse in the wake of the Jimmy Savile affair, drew on my experience of losing two daughters in a rancorous divorce. Here I want to draw your attention to a few of the other poems in <i>A Limited Season</i> that draw on my own story.<br />
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We need turn no further than page 14, to '<a href="http://slushpoet.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/0716.html" target="_blank">Declaration of war</a>'. Notice how most (the middle four couplets) of this tiny poem, which is all one sentence, are a parenthetical aside. Strip down the poem's syntax and you get a very simple statement:<br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘Can either of you tell me,’ </span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">the conciliator said, </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘when you first noticed </span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">your marriage was failing?’</span></div>
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">This came from several events combined into one painful memory, times when my ex and I came into contact with social workers, counsellors and doctors. Of course, none of them actually said what I wrote in the poem, except by omission. It was the proverbial elephant in the consulting room for a while. And the mortgage advice? Well, we had money troubles too, back then, which no doubt played a part in our break up. But then doesn't every cloud have a silver lining?</span><br />
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">And those money troubles once brought me to the edge of madness. (Or mental illness, as we are supposed to refer to it now.) I was twenty-four and I walked into a doctor's surgery to complain of sleeplessness and irritability. I had been working very long hours, I was burdened with debt, my first child was on the way. The doctor asked me in his kindest tone, 'What is the trouble?', and I broke down in tears. I can attest to the efficacy of antidepressants. I didn't go back to work for three months after that, and when I did, it was to hand in my resignation. </span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Cue the poem '<a href="http://slushpoet.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/0205.html" target="_blank">Maiden flight</a>'. For it was as if I had stepped back from a precipice, from which I had surveyed the abyss. Out of it hope had risen, hard to see from within a rut, but easy when you're staring out into oblivion. It showed me there was freedom in going with the flow, following the currents wherever they lead. Oh, I just realised we're back at <a href="http://lyingself.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/my-faith-in-poetry.html" target="_blank">faith</a> again. Funny that.</span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Anyway, the 'take home', as snake oil peddling management consultants call it, is this: antidepressants only address symptoms, the cure for living hell is a life better lived.</span><br />
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">One should start, perhaps, with a clear conscience. But I say it would be easier if you could start out carrying in your heart all the pain you caused others in your previous life, metaphorically of course. But just knowing that we start out tainted would make it so much less painful to be good. How much finer it would be to win love than to lose it, and to look at oneself and say 'this does not have to be as it is, I can change me'. There is something in original sin.</span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Each of the three images portrayed in '<a href="http://slushpoet.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/quantum-perspective-on-splitting.html" target="_blank">A quantum perspective on splitting the nuclear family</a>' is an real and painful memory. (However, the cat is allegorical. No moggies were drowned in the making of this poem!) </span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">The beach was in Hastings. We had gone there after the disintegration of my first marriage, my mother having lost her daughter-in-law and lost contact with her grandchildren. The sea was frozen along the shore. It was 1987. A year later, having lost touch with my family, I walked out on someone I loved leaving a note asking her to be gone by the time I returned. And all through everything, my father acted as though I were the perfect son - and how that burned!</span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">And, yes, at times I drank to forget.</span><br />
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">The cat, of course, was the one Schrodinger imagined leaving in a box, a cat that theoretically would be both dead and alive until the box was opened. (The title did state it was a quantum perspective - pay attention!) Observant readers will have noted the reappearance of that cat later in <i>A Limited Season</i>. He crops up in my favourite poem in the book, '<a href="http://slushpoet.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/0517.html" target="_blank">Letting the cat out</a>'.</span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Before I explain my fondness for that poem, let me tell you about the epigram (included on the blog but omitted from <i>A Limited Season</i>). At the weekends I live in a delightful village in Cheshire. A short distance from my village lies the Ellesmere Port Vauxhall car plant (the UK brand of General Motors). In 2012 the plant was threatened with closure, and for several months no one knew if it would survive. It was completely out of everyone in the UK's hands - the management, the unions, the politicians. Everyone waited for a decision from Detroit. And meanwhile - you guessed it! - the plant was both dead and alive. Here, pussy!</span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm almost as fond of that cat as I am of this poem. I'm always much happier that the cat survives.</span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">As I said, 'Letting the cat out' is one of my favourite poems. It ticks several boxes for me. First, it is a sonnet, and I am a sucker for sonnets. You only have to count up the fourteen-liners in <i>A Limited Season</i> to know that: there are - wait for it - <i>fourteen</i> of them (and I'm not going to claim that was an accident!). Second, it is so visceral. Can't you just feel - and hear - that 'slurping birthing squelch' as the box is brought up? Third, it is full of unobtrusive rhymes (my favourite being 'we rubbed oil of cloves / under our noses'. Finally, just read it aloud - savour its texture, its rhythms, its melody! Okay, so I sound like a comedian laughing at his own joke, but if I can't love my poems, can I really expect you to?</span>MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-14256264203168733412013-05-27T08:32:00.002-07:002013-05-27T08:32:59.784-07:00A year of wringing hands (Part 1)I thought it would be fun to share some of the background to the poems in <i>A Limited Season</i>. Some people don't like to much explanation, preferring to engage with poems as self-contained worlds with voices of their own. This is generally the way I approach other people's poems, so I have sympathy with that view. But, of course, I am unable to look at my own poems ever in that way, and, in any case, I suspect knowing a little more about the background of some of my favourite poems (by other poets) would deepen my relationship with them.<br />
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Certainly my relationship with my own poems has many more dimensions than I can hope to explore in other people's work. So I will try to share some of this with you in the hope that it will enhance your enjoyment of my poems. (Hyperlinks in this post are to my Slush Poetry blog where some of the poems can be found.)<br />
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We'll begin with the first poem in <i>A Limited Season</i>, '<a href="http://slushpoet.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/0704.html" target="_blank">Wellmeaning</a>'. The epigraph shown on the blog version, but omitted from the published version, is a clue to its origin: 'Wellmeaning' was written as part of a year-long project for which I wrote poems inspired by news headlines. (I originally hoped to produce a collection from this, which would have been called <i>A Year of Wringing Hands</i> after a line in one of the early poems, but the resulting body of work was too uneven in style and quality.)<br />
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For 'Wellmeaning', the headline 'HIV test will be sold over the counter', taken from the free London paper <i>METRO</i> in July 2012, appealed strongly to me because of its connection, though the progression to AIDS, to terminal illness. My father was (and, at the time of writing, still is) suffering from a 'terminal' cancer of the oesophagus. I wanted to write about how, only eight months after his diagnosis (and over-pessimistic prognosis of a six month lifespan), those of us who love him seem to have come to terms already with his slow act of dying. That is, I was feeling more guilt than grief, and sought in poetry a catharsis.<br />
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Of course, the headline concerned HIV, not cancer, and I decided to fictionalize the poem with a protagonist infected with that disease, the research for which I found distressing, humbling and apposite in equal measure. I think I did it justice - do you agree?<br />
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I decided to omit two of the original stanzas from the version in <i>A Limited Season</i> (the third and fourth stanzas as shown on the blog), because they seemed on reflection to repeat points made better elsewhere. This kind of decision is always easier to make with old poems than with fresh ones. I hope I got it right. Another omission from the final version was the original epigraph. Removing it gave the poem a more personal feel, as though it were addressed to a person, not an anonymous 'case'. 'Wellmeaning' has proved to be very popular and deserves it place as the opening poem.<br />
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In December 2012, I was bringing the news project to a close but was still drawn, because of my father's continuing illness, to headlines about cancer. On 7th December the <i>METRO</i> ran a story with the headline 'Cancer strikes more people but death rates are falling'. The story described how cancer sufferers are surviving longer, often indefinitely, and how medicine was turning away from trying to cure the illness, and instead managing its symptoms to prevent them worsening. In other words, patients were having to learn to love with the disease.<br />
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It struck me that patients are not the only people who suffer from their cancer - that their loved ones, particularly those who live with them and care for them on a daily basis - also have to deal with its ramifications. From this thought was born the poem '<a href="http://slushpoet.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/1207.html" target="_blank">Live with it</a>'.<br />
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One immediately obvious change that was made between the blog version and the one in <i>A Limited Season</i> is the change from first person to third person. The protagonist is a woman; this is obvious in both versions. When I originally wrote 'Live with it' I had her telling us her story. But, of course, I wanted <i>A Limited Season</i> to work as a single collection with a recognizable voice - mine.<br />
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The poem remains sympathetic to the plight of this woman, who is feels helpless in the face of her friend's illness, while having to cope with her ill husband's impotence and rage. It would be a depressing message were she to be simply portrayed as a victim, but it is her love for them both that pains her, and it is for love that she will bear to go on living with it.<br />
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The last poem I want to tell you about today is '<a href="http://slushpoet.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/1214.html" target="_blank">Missing the match in McDonald's</a>'. This poem was already simmering when I came across a headline in the Telegraph: 'Child abuse allegation soar in wake of Savile scandal'. (Jimmy Savile was famous in the United Kingdom as a radio DJ turned TV presenter, and as a charity fundraiser. His fame was so great and his reputation for good deeds so unquestionable in life that the hundreds - yes, hundreds - of child victims of his decades of sex predation only felt able to come forward after his death. Savile is also the subject of another poem in <i>A Limited Season</i>, 'Pissing in the wind'.)<br />
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'Missing the match in McDonald's' is, of course, a sonnet. The first eight lines are largely autobiographical, and relate to a short period during which I had some strained access to my two daughters from my first marriage (I have now all but lost touch with them both. Though I frequently see the eldest one's picture appear on Facebook, I am afraid to click on it for fear of being ignored or rejected. I'd counsel you not to judge me a coward without knowing all the facts.) I had been observing Saturday dads for some time and considering writing about their plight, so the opportunity afforded by the Savile headline was a welcome one.<br />
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But the headline sent the poem off in a darker direction, for I imagined the fathers of small children acutely aware of latent suspicions. With a witch hunt under way for sex fiends in positions of trust, every man entrusted with the care of a child was suddenly a suspected paedophile. Will he be undressing them? Will he be bathing them? Will he be <i>touching</i> them? It all reminded me of the way innocent Asian men carrying backpacks were scrutinized after the terror attacks on London.<br />
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I hope you have enjoyed these glimpses under into my engine compartment. Within reason I am happy to answer questions, or I'd really like to know what you think of my poems and other writing. Just leave a message below. Peace to all!MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-68843176291022686152013-05-08T11:27:00.000-07:002013-05-08T11:27:03.297-07:00My faith in poetryWhen I was in my early twenties I began searching for greater meaning to life. My wife, who had yet to turn into a witch, was expecting our first child, and it was the wonder of this above all else that convinced me there had to be more to life than was presented to the senses. And it was the birth of the child, my daughter Heather, and the heavy societal expectation she would be baptised, that delivered me into the hands of the Church of England.<br />
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I tried to be a Christian, I really did. I got up on Sunday mornings and attended mass, shook hands with other worshippers, wishing them the peace of the Lord with my sincerest smile, knelt for wafers and cloying wine, went to tea parties, invited all my friends and family to my confirmation. Jesus, I even tried bell ringing. I turned a blind eye while my parish priest got his bishop to sanction his marriage to a divorcee. (I was later, after my divorce from The Wicked One, denied the right to remarry in the Church of England.) And all the while I tried to persuade myself that, if I just persevered, I would come to believe there was a god.<br />
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My poem "<a href="http://slushpoet.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/1301.html" target="_blank">The great key</a>" tries to capture that burning schizoid desire to believe in things my senses told me were utterly false, to persevere with patterns of behaviour and speech that felt, even at the time, dishonest and debasing. Ironically my behaviour became more devout and evangelical the stronger my doubts grew. And if "schizoid" seems strong, let me tell you a year after I first walked into a church I was on medication for anxiety and depression, so it's not a million miles off the mark.<br />
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(Incidentally "<a href="http://slushpoet.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/1301.html" target="_blank">The great key</a>" is based on a true story. I recently decided to visit the parish church in the village I have lived in for sixteen years. I had never been inside it, but when I went I found the door locked.)<br />
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My recovery from Christianity was effected not by medicine, but by philosophy. Plato's <em>Symposium</em> was my starting point, but I was subsequently counselled by Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, Locke, Hume, Nietzsche Marx, Mill, Sartre, Russell, Dennett. And Voltaire, oh Voltaire. I learned that there are no right answers, or at least there is no one right answer (but no unanswerable questions either), I learned to appreciate the rich and unfathomable complexity of the world, and I also learned to tolerate, even to embrace, ambiguity.<br />
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One day I read an article in <em>New Scientist</em> about the beneficial effects of Buddhist mindfulness meditation, which it claimed induced neurological changes that made practitioners happier and more focused. I didn't know how to meditate, but I live quite close to the headquarters of the Buddhist Society in London, so I decided to go to one of their courses to learn more. By the second week of the course I was so fascinated by Buddhism itself that I completely lost sight of my original aim, and by the end of the course was willing to call myself a Buddhist.<br />
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<li>I do not believe there is a god, nor that there being one would explain anything.</li>
<li>I do not believe in an afterlife, nor do I feel any need to believe in one.</li>
<li>If there is a heaven or a hell, I believe this is it.</li>
<li>I believe we are reborn every moment we live, that everything that happens happens now.</li>
<li>I feel no need to explain how this world came to be, nor how it will end.</li>
<li>I believe that what we do is more important than what we believe.</li>
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This is not an exhaustive statement of my beliefs, but just enough, I hope, to explain how my predisposition to religion and immersion in philosophy and science perfectly readied me to accept the Buddhist view. For all of these "beliefs" are compatible with, if not fundamental to, Buddhism. I say "beliefs", but the it would be more accurate to say I considered them as propositions and found them to be either true, or at least helpful as heuristics, useful ways of dealing with the world. I put my faith in them in the same way as I put my faith in my senses.<br />
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And of course this new faith has found its way into my poems, too. A poem like "<a href="http://slushpoet.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/1204.html" target="_blank">Waiting for the R Train</a>", for instance, which deals with the real-life horror of facing imminent death, illustrates how it is the burdens our past regrets and hopes for an imagined future that prevent us living fully in the present. No one ever experiences their own death, of course, in the present, but only ever through anticipation. "<a href="http://slushpoet.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/0205.html" target="_blank">Maiden flight</a>" explores the same idea in a different way, its subject once again death but this time suicide, and once again we experience the liberation from casting off attachment - to mistakes from the past and to shattered hopes for the future. It's not quite nirvana, but doesn't suck.<br />
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In fairness to Christians let's remember that Jesus' parable of the birds said much the same thing.<br />
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Peace to all beings!<br />
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(c) 2013 Andy HickmottMrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-79733577228860637952013-05-07T12:02:00.000-07:002013-05-07T12:02:10.340-07:00The season for mushroomsAt the end of 2011 my father Archie was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. He had put off visiting his doctor, suffering weeks of difficulty swallowing, until at last he was unable to swallow water. Even then he waited until he was severely dehydrated and suffering excruciating headaches. By then the cancer had taken a hold; a tumour had spread three quarters of the way around Archie's oesophagus. His doctors told him he might get another six months. Archie said he hoped for a year.<br />
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The doctors could do little more than patch him up. They inserted a stent to open his oesophagus so that he could swallow. They put him in touch with the Macmillan Trust, who allotted him a visiting nurse for palliative care. Eighteen months later he is still alive and, even if "well" is not the right word, mentally vigorous and independently mobile. Yesterday was Archie's birthday: he is eighty-eight years old, but let's have none of that "he's had a good innings" bullshit, he's no more desire to die than you or I have, and he's as much right to hold on to life, even if he smoked heavily until he was fifty and was overweight most of his life. Before he became ill he weighed over two hundred pounds, now he's down to a hundred and thirty.<br />
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Archie isn't "battling with cancer", he lets his doctors get on with that. What Archie is battling with is pain. He refuses to take higher doses of morphine because he fears it will dull his mind, and that is all he has. He endures frequent avalanches of pain. I don't think he dwells on dying, just treats it as a fact of life (as it is for us all) and tries to grab what he can of life between spasms.<br />
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He refers to his tumour as a mushroom.<br />
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Archie isn't the only one who's had to come to terms with his terminal illness. My aunt, whom he has shared a house with since my mother died, has had to become his carer. But she is not in great health herself: before he fell ill, Archie used to take care of <i>her</i>. She has been very kind and has done all that anyone could have asked of her. My sister has been a rock, too, making sure that all Archie's affairs are properly in order to his liking. What little money Archie has accumulated in his life will go to my brother, who has advanced multiple sclerosis. If Archie could give his life to restore my brother's health, I'm sure he would.<br />
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But Archie's protracted enactment of the dying process has affected us all very deeply in other ways. We have been through mourning for a man who is still very much alive. I remember the shock I felt at first when my sister phone with the news of his illness. (I live two hundred miles away, so can only visit occasionally.) I walked downstairs, feeling numb, trying to make sense of the meaningless facts. I sat on a piano stool, closed my eyes, and, because I am a Buddhist, tried to think of Archie, my suffering father, in terms of loving kindness, and to think about the impermanence of all things, which gave his dying some proper context. It helped, but I think the passing of time has had as much to do with my acceptance of what is happening.<br />
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During those first grieving months I also channeled my feelings into my poetry, and several of the poems in my first collection, <i><a href="http://bit.ly/hickmott" target="_blank">A Limited Season</a></i>, arise from my dealing with my father's illness. The two that were most directly influenced were "Deadly Nightshade" (previously unpublished, but discussed below) and <a href="http://slushpoet.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/0405.html" target="_blank">"Steak and mushroom pie"</a>, which was featured in the April 2013 edition of <i><a href="http://www.popshotpopshot.com/" target="_blank">Popshot</a></i> (the "Imagination Issue"). Another poem that was affected by my grieving for my still living father was "<a href="http://slushpoet.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/0218.html" target="_blank">After disconnection</a>", which, although it makes no direct references to Archie, I am unable to read without visualizing my childhood home.<br />
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Here is the first of the six stanzas of "Deadly Nightshade":<br />
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-7aec730f-804d-a31b-0cb5-6b8d6845be73" style="font-weight: normal;"></b><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-right: 93.75pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-7aec730f-804d-a31b-0cb5-6b8d6845be73" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A mushroom lodged in the damp </span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-7aec730f-804d-a31b-0cb5-6b8d6845be73" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">stump of your throat. It smelled </span></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-right: 93.75pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-7aec730f-804d-a31b-0cb5-6b8d6845be73" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">like the inside of an old shoe </span></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-right: 93.75pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-7aec730f-804d-a31b-0cb5-6b8d6845be73" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and now your breath smells of brie, </span></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-right: 93.75pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-7aec730f-804d-a31b-0cb5-6b8d6845be73" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or athlete’s foot. It grew fat </span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-7aec730f-804d-a31b-0cb5-6b8d6845be73" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and got greedy; the more you fed it, </span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-7aec730f-804d-a31b-0cb5-6b8d6845be73" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the less it left for you. You shrivelled </span></b></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">as your pipeline silted up.</span></b><br />
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You can see how Archie's tumor humour became a central motif in the poem, one that is carried through the other five stanzas, and is revisited in "Steak and mushroom pie". The motif will occur in another poem, which must remain under wraps, for one of the consequences, for a poet at any rate, of witnessing the drawn out death of a loved one is that there is more than enough time to work on a worthy elegy.MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-30974445008279634592012-11-03T03:17:00.001-07:002012-11-03T03:17:44.889-07:00What is to become of Slush Poetry?I have announced that Slush Poetry as we know it will come to an end at the end of this year. However, that is not altogether accurate. What will be brought to an end is the series of news-related poems that have been appearing on the Slush Poet blog, and its curtailment is not a recent decision but the fulfillment of a scheme conceived late last year.<br />
<br />
What has been known until now as 'Slush Poetry' was always planned to be a one year (or, more strictly, a year and two days) project to chronicle what I hoped would be a remarkable year, 2012, a year in which there would be a Royal Jubilee and the London Olympics at a time of great economic, political and environmental turmoil. That is, something to write about. Its aim was to capture the zeitgeist of the year, rather than attempt any historical record, and it was always going to reflect my own views and interests. In fact, it is probably more a portrait of me at that point in my life than it is an objective record of anything else going on.<br />
<br />
I have been amazed and delighted by the following the blog and my related Twitter feeds have attracted, and I am very grateful to everyone who has visited the site, commented on poems, corresponded, retweeted or engaged in any way with the project. I even feel I have made some friends, albeit ones I will probably never meet. It really is quite humbling.<br />
<br />
I have been pondering two things: what to do with the current collection, and what to do next. Now I have decided.<br />
<br />
The current collection will end when I post the last poem on New Year's Day. No promises, but it will probably have an Hawaiian theme because I will want to capture humanity's last moment in 2012. (For the same reason, the collection began in Samoa, which was first across the date line in January.) After that, is it too much to hope that I might find a publisher for all or part of it? I will be trying to. It even has a new title: <i>The Year of Wringing Hands</i>.<br />
<br />
As for what to do next, the Slush Poet will go on but on a different blog site. The new site will (if all goes to plan) present a series of images combining photography with poetry, surface beauty with lingering thoughts. Imagine seeing a poem hung in a gallery surrounded by white space, that's where I'm heading to. And this new space now has a name: <i>Ma Pottery [sic]</i>.<br />
<br />
So wish me well and come along for the experience. I can't do this without my friends.<br />
<br />
Slush.MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-17306008769045475122012-04-10T09:24:00.000-07:002012-04-10T09:24:49.321-07:00Beating up on the Buddha<b id="internal-source-marker_0.9075362193398178"><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was saddened</span></b><b id="internal-source-marker_0.9075362193398178"><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> recently</span></b><b><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to learn that 'Buddha' could be a term of abuse. One can not imagine British newspapers using ‘Jesus Christ’ or ‘the prophet Muhammad’ in a derogatory sense, but, over the Easter weekend, at least 500 news stories appeared in the press or online using the term 'little Buddhas' to depict spoilt children, whose character flaws include laziness, hedonism and an inability to concentrate at school.</span></b><br />
<span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As a Buddhist my first reaction was sorrow that so many prominent voices could be attached to such ignorant minds. The very essence of Buddhist teaching — Buddhism 101, if you will — concerns training the mind to concentrate effectively on what is important. This Buddhist practice of mindfulness is empirically proven to </span><span style="font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">improve</span><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> concentration. As taught by the Buddha some 2,600 years ago, it would seem to be of great value in addressing some of the very flaws the so-called 'little Buddhas' are said to exhibit.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If such ignorance among journalists is saddening, a similar level of ignorance among scientists - scientists who purport to be experts in the origins of religious experience and thought, no less - is quite shocking, particularly disappointing to my rational mind.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">S. Jay Olshansky, writing in New Scientist (7 April 2012), professed that the wellspring of all religions is a quest for immortality. He (the ‘S’ is short for Stuart) goes on to laud a new book by a fellow scientist, Stephen Cave, which asserts, in true reductionist style, that </span><span style="font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">all</span><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> societies rely on one of four narratives to assuage their fearful knowledge of their own mortality. Among these 'narratives' are plans ‘B... resurrection’ and ‘C... the soul’. Since plans ‘A’ and ‘D’ are not applicable to religion, and given the reviewer’s own expressed views and professed expertise, one must deduce that one or both of plans ‘B’ and ‘C’ are supposed by Olshansky and Cave to apply to Buddhist societies, which have existed for over half of man’s recorded history, and to Buddhists of today whom number some half a billion people (and ought therefore to be a touchstone for any credible theory).</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am well aware that such assumptions are commonplace, though most people who hold them would realize that that is all they are: assumptions. Let us restate them baldly: the quest for immortality, the desire to be reborn, the possession of a soul.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now let us look at what the Buddha actually taught. The ultimate goal of Buddhist practice is nirvana (nibbana in Pali), which is a condition in which one ceases to be ‘reborn’, by which the Buddhist means that one's previous actions no longer control (or 'condition') one's life. Buddhist philosophy is emphatic that there is no soul, no permanent ‘self’ that experiences life and could live on after the death of one’s body. In fact, Buddhism insists that nothing can be permanent (impermanence in Buddhist philosophy is one of the three signs of existence, and therefore applies to all conditioned things). Buddhists aim to achieve peace in this life, not any other, by following a sensible ‘middle path’ between extremes, and by concentrating on what really matters.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps Buddhism is misunderstood because it does not seek to evangelise. Compassion and tolerance are central to the teaching, for the simple reason that hatred and intolerance are harmful to oneself. Perhaps it's because I'm quite new to the religion that I still care a little what other people think. I hope that this explanation improves people’s knowledge and understanding, and is helpful to them to this extent.</span>
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<b><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(c) 2012 Andy Hickmott</span></b>MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-7955617588989124412012-04-06T02:11:00.000-07:002012-04-06T02:11:26.646-07:00Where have all the mile markers gone?<b id="internal-source-marker_0.7961273028049618"><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve heard it said writing a novel is like running a marathon. Like hell is it. My first novel took a little over nine months to write. (I could have said 'gestate', but too many metaphors spoil the broth. It was in any case stillborn, at best a sloppy mess that I immediately set upon, working its twisted limbs to fashion a marginally improved version.) But at no point during its writing, or rewriting, did my novel ever lead me into that dark, despondent place that marathon runners must pass through in the middle of a race.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I quit running marathons because I realized I was never going to run a faster one. I started a novel partly because I suddenly had so much time on my hands.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I ran my first marathon in 2004, in New York City, finishing in a fairly respectable (and bitterly disappointing) 3:48. I failed to finish my second (Blackpool), and literally limped in after nearly five hours in my third (London). I had fractured my shin. After two long years of rehabilitation I finally finished the London Marathon in my best time: 3:40. Three years of pain and frustration to shave off eight precious minutes.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So when I compare writing to running a marathon, you can be sure I'm not basing my comparison on Wikipedia.</span><br /><b id="internal-source-marker_0.7961273028049618"></b></b><br />
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.7961273028049618"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.7961273028049618"><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />~~~~~~</span></b></b></div>
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</b><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">People who haven't run a marathon seem to talk a lot about something called 'the wall'. I can only speculate about what that is, perhaps it's based on tales of athletes dropping out in the latter stages of the race because of some apparently catastrophic failure. Many physiological factors can lead to that. For example, depletion of glycogen, stress fractures, or plain old cramp. Been there, done that. But some runners keep going through those troubles, so I doubt they are the real causes of failure. That is something much, much worse.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And it's something that afflicts writers as much as marathon runners.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's the aforementioned 'dark, despondent place' that occupies the space between mile markers thirteen and twenty. Between 'great, I'm half way there', and 'God, where have all the mile markers gone?' Runners give up the will to finish the race just seconds after they give up the will to live.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And writers? Where is this vale of despondency for them?</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I only know where it came along my writer's journey. As I said, I finished the first draft of my masterpiece completely unafflicted by existential torment. (Deep breath.) I saw that it needed rewriting, so I rewrote it. I could still see room for improvement, so I wrote it again. And again, just for the sheer bloody-mindedness of it. And I beheld my masterpiece, and I loved it so much I could have written it a Sapphic ode.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And I bagged it up and sent it with a covering letter and a kiss for luck to, well, to literary agent Lucy Luck as it happens. It was too good an omen to ignore.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was disappointed when Ms Luck did not sign me up by return post. But not deterred. Not yet.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wasted no time getting started on my next novel, a work of such brilliance that it put even its illustrious predecessor in the shade. As before, I immersed myself in research and plotting and drafting, night after night, agonising page after agonising page. </span><br /><b id="internal-source-marker_0.7961273028049618"><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 180pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />~~~~~~</span></div>
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</b><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Press fast forward and witness me standing over my doormat staring fearfully at the ominous dead thing laying there. I knew what it contained. Just like all the others (and since I had long since lost count, let's accept for the fakery of precision that it was the thirtieth in its line) it would contain a standard letter, wishing me luck without the scantest sign that my beloved had even been read.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This was about the time I sank into that trough, when I was tested and found myself</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 180pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">wanting.</span><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 180pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">~~~~~~</span></div>
<span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I stopped working on my follow up novel. (There was nothing to follow up.) Suddenly the next novel seemed impossible to complete. Every conceivable excuse presented itself unbidden, in the same way that minor aches and tiredness make marathon runners reappraise the gentle uphill stretch ahead. 'No way! That must be one in ten and it goes on for over a mile!'</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And like Paula Radcliffe at her nadir, I sat at the roadside with my head in my hands.</span><br /><b id="internal-source-marker_0.7961273028049618"><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 180pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />~~~~~~</span></div>
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</b><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But this is not a story about giving up. Nor is it about going on when all common sense says the way is blocked, your supplies depleted, the mission futile. If I'd quit back then, this story wouldn't be written at all.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And here I am, writing.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Somewhere along the way I outran that long, cold shadow, though I can't say precisely when. I think there was one key factor in my redemption, and that is that I kept going in whatever way I could. (That's how you finish a marathon; it isn't rocket science!) I decided to beef up my skills. I'd already read just about every self-help manual I knew about, so I went out looking for guidance, for someone to take me apart and reassemble me as a writer. I applied for MAs in creative writing, and got rejected. So I signed up for an undergrad course with the Open University. I got interested once again in poetry, and became the Slush Poet. I threw myself into a writers' group, joined the Poetry Society, started performing poetry, started tweeting, got out there.</span><br /><b id="internal-source-marker_0.7961273028049618"><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 180pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />~~~~~~</span></div>
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</b><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yesterday I went to an open evening at City University in London, where Jonathan Myerson runs what is perhaps the best MA in the UK for novelists. We spoke about the prospect of my joining the course. Unlike the last time we met, I really felt that I belonged there, like I had earned a seat at the table. I even considered applying to be part of this year's intake, but I decided against it: there are things I want to finish first. My OU course, a year of Slush Poetry, my Spring reboot. I can do all this. I am beyond the dark, despondent place now. The wind is behind me, the finishing line in sight and it's all downhill from here.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then a weird thing happened on the way home. I had an idea for a </span><span style="font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">great</span><span style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> new novel.</span></b><br />
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">(c) 2012 Andy Hickmott</span></div>MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-85362396684915740922012-03-25T02:39:00.000-07:002012-03-25T02:44:30.479-07:00The making of a born writerI'm a natural, me,<br />
a born writer. No,<br />
that's a lie. Let me, then,<br />
atone with the truth...<br />
<br />
I think I'm becoming a good writer within the bounds of my repertoire. That is, I am pleased with some of my writing when I later go back and read it afresh. This is an accomplishment.<br />
<br />
It is, however, only a start. And it has come at the expense of much time and effort: the dozens of how-to books, books on viewpoint, on style, on characterization, on editing, on dramatization, on genre, on grammar; the prize-winning or short-listed novels, poems and short stories I have read and taken as my benchmark; the hundreds of pieces of writing I have reviewed on <a href="http://www.youwriteon.com/" target="_blank">YouWriteOn</a> in return for sometimes invaluable feedback from other writers and, occasionally, from editors (several of my works have made the coveted No 1 spot); the hours spent with fellow writers at <a href="http://bit.ly/owghome" target="_blank">Original Writers</a> and with fellow members of the <a href="http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/" target="_blank">Poetry Society</a> at Stanza Groups or in performance at the <a href="http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/cafe/events/" target="_blank">Poetry Cafe</a>, and all the support and encouragement they have given me; the writing courses - <a href="http://www.open.ac.uk/" target="_blank">Open University</a>, <a href="http://www.faberacademy.co.uk/Public/Home.aspx" target="_blank">Faber Academy</a>, <a href="http://www.arvonfoundation.org/" target="_blank">Arvon Foundation</a> - that have brought me into contact with successful writers who have generously shared their insights and encouragement; the bale of rejection letters that has helped me keep everything in perspective.<br />
<br />
And now I am chronicling the year - this year, 2012, the year of the London Olympics, of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, of global recession - in rhyme as the <a href="http://bit.ly/slushpoet" target="_blank">Slush Poet</a>, a project that is stretching my abilities and keeping me safe from the '<a href="http://ryangraudin.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/fending-off-snis-shiny-new-idea.html" target="_blank">Shiny New Idea Syndrome</a>' (thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/ryangraudin" target="_blank">Ryan Graudin</a> for the diagnosis!) that has previously afflicted me.<br />
<br />
And taking up nearly all of my time.<br />
<br />
Yet when the poet <a href="http://www.katrinanaomi.co.uk/" target="_blank">Katrina Naomi</a>, who is my tutor at the OU, recently recommended to her students a couple of books that she said had inspired her early in her career, I didn't hesitate to buy a copy of both. <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1590307941/ref=oh_o01_s00_i00_details" target="_blank">'Writing Down the Bones' by Natalie Goldberg</a> is about letting go of the inner critic and just creating; <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0330343580/ref=oh_o01_s00_i01_details" target="_blank">'The Artist's Way' by Julia Cameron</a> is a twelve week course on inspiration. They sit before me now like fresh margaritas on a parched man's garden table.<br />
<br />
But when the heck am I going to find to savour them properly with all my other commitments?<br />
<br />
Aha, I have a plan. On 31 December 2012, when the Slush Poet posts his final poem, I will be free sip those margaritas, pick up some of those shiny new ideas and give them a jolly good rub. And here's what I'm going to do: the first three months of 2013 will be given over to reading them both, in parallel, all other work put on a back-burner while a relight my inner furnace. And to make sure it happens I am going to set up a new Twitter account called 'MyLyingSelf ... hold on a second ... there, done it. Now I'm going to tweet at myself (using <a href="http://hootsuite.com/" target="_blank">Hootsuite</a> to pre-schedule tweets <i>en masse</i>), so that my best-laid plan is actually impressed freshly upon me on the 1st of January - like a waiter appearing out of nowhere with those lovely salt-rimmed drinks on a silver platter.MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-3154155982984035972012-03-15T08:49:00.000-07:002012-03-15T08:49:54.310-07:00In the vale of Slush poetryI am almost three months into this project, writing as the Slush Poet to chronicle 2012 through the medium of poetry, so now would seem a suitable moment to pause, to set down my thesaurus, my rhyming dictionary and my fountain pen, and to take in the view. (That in itself is fanciful: I write almost exclusively on a computer using Google Docs, with frequent nods to <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/" target="_blank">Dictionary.com</a> and <a href="http://www.b-rhymes.com/" target="_blank">B-Rhymes</a>; but that's okay, we'll call it a metaphor.)<br />
<br />
I am breathless. I keep falling behind; by the time I've wrung a poem out of my fickle muse, the world has moved on and there are new news events to versify. Today I am up to date, tomorrow I will begin once more to fall behind.<br />
<br />
What can I see from my resting place? Poetry surrounds me, as does life itself; but what I'm most concerned about is the trail of poems I have left behind me. So far, I have written thirty-four poems, most of which I have published on the <a href="http://slushpoet.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Slush Poet blog site</a>. That's about one every two days. I've tried to vary the form, the timbre, the length, the voice. I want the poems to be enjoyable as a continuous sequence capturing the essence of, if not the year, at least <i>my</i> year, 2012 <i>as I lived it and as it touched me</i>.<br />
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But are the poems any good? I think some of them are. I've had a lot of encouragement from readers, not just from my friends but from people I previously didn't know. Some of the poems have had a better reception than others, but that doesn't mean the others should be omitted. Would you really want every day to be your birthday?<br />
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Who am I kidding? We all know it takes time to craft a good poem, a long time to craft a great one. It takes more than two days. So, why go on? Perhaps because the pressure to produce a poem every few days is what I need to make me grow. I'm realizing that deadlines (even self-imposed ones, maybe <i>especially</i> self-imposed ones) are a creative spur. Without that pressure to produce not just another poem but a <i>different</i> poem, would I really be so varied in what I write?<br />
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So where is the Slush Poet heading next? Like you, I'll have to open the papers tomorrow to find out.MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-8761828255761327512012-03-01T04:12:00.000-08:002012-03-01T04:12:35.244-08:00The Zen art of literary Ex-Lax<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">We’ve all been there, squatted upon the same spot staring at the same blank space for hours on end while words and forms back up behind the strangulating sphincter of premature self-editing. Commonly known as writer’s block, straining to do the rewrite before the rough draft. It’s like trying to squeeze Mother Mary from your arse.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Last night I spent over three hours rearranging pairs of slant-rhyming words, trying to write a poem about, as it happens, the riots outside Bagram airbase. Result: flatulence. It stank. Every artefact I strained onto the page was a monstrosity. Eventually, more from frustration than from wisdom, I set about writing something completely different, a poem about my father, and this time the words flowed smoothly onto the page and then seemed to arrange themselves into lovely eight-line stanzas while I watched agog.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">The difference, of course, was that I knew exactly what I wanted to say – and that I said it without a great deal of constipating thought. I won’t strain the metaphor as far as I might here, but be assured my writing was fluid. The lesson? It is so easy to criticize what you have written, but for heaven’s sake wait until you’ve seen what it is!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">So relax. Now wait patiently, sculpting knife in hand, for the raw materials. Hail Mary!</span>MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-34090372704761379352012-02-28T06:10:00.000-08:002012-02-28T06:10:14.013-08:00Watch out below, those might not be poems hatching!<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I, the Slush Poet, am beginning to regret my decision to chronicle 2012 in verse. When I hatched the idea at the end of December, I failed to anticipate several factors: the voracity of my hatchlings, the paucity of inspiring news to feed to them and the fickleness of their eclectic appetites.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Writing a poem a day is easy (unless, like Niall O’Sullivan, you restrict yourself to terza rima). What is hard is varying the style and voice sufficiently to avert a suffocating boredom from afflicting both poet and reader alike. I think I have managed admirably so far, judging by the varied comments left on the Slush Poet blog or tweeted straight at me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">But it is becoming a strain. What occupies the world’s news media changes much more slowly than I ever imagined. There are only so many poems one can write about greedy bankers or royal arse kissing. And I don’t like to be too obvious in my responses to the news. Finding a tangential link that fertilizes my wordy organ is getting harder: I think it might be going numb from over-use. Each new day brings instead of fresh headlines a mounding urge to lay. I look for golden eggs, I find guano.</span></div>MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-67306552367186681382012-02-24T10:17:00.001-08:002012-02-24T10:17:51.685-08:00My dad's mushroom<div>
I have never told my dad that I love him. I have never felt the need before now. I am sure he knows anyway. But now that he's been diagnosed, now that the prognosis has been handed down - now that he has his Macmillan nurse - I want him to know he means more than the world to me. But, like I said, he probably knows already. <br />
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See, Dad is a lorry driver, a trucker, a haulier - or at least he was until he retired a quarter of a century ago. You can't have a conversation like that with a lorry driver. The years of retirement haven't softened him. He's greyer and he's nearly deaf, but he still fills every cubic inch of space ever allotted him. Outside he's lost none of his stature; it's inside he's doing a vanishing trick. <br />
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He has a tumour growing round his oesophagus. He calls it his mushroom. At eighty-six, doctors can do little more than slow its growth, its theft of my father, with radiotherapy. He says he's going to beat it, kill the filthy fungus before it kills him.<br />
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If I turned up and blurted out my love for him he might reappraise his odds. I'll write a Sapphic ode instead. </div>MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-77114800521009917722012-02-23T11:23:00.000-08:002012-02-25T03:57:36.556-08:00This is not a protestA friend contacted me yesterday (in fairness, he contacted quite a few other people too) and asked me whether I could provide a poem in support of Bradley Manning, the poor sod being put through the nail-studded wringer that is the US justice system for leaking military secrets via those sterling folk (he winks) at WikiLeaks. I said I'll see what I can do. After all, I don't like to say 'no' to friends who ask nicely, not even to ones who come over as rather too earnest on issues I care little about.<br />
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But why didn't I care, or at least not care a lot? I think it's a question of perspective. Bradley Manning is said to have leaked material that he knew was classified, and knew that by doing so he would be breaking the law, and that as a private in the US Army he would be prosecuted through a court martial, and given the nature of the material he supposedly leaked, that his prosecution would be dissimilar to, say, a six month sabbatical on Hawaii. So he did something unlawful, he knew it was unlawful, he was caught and he is paying the price. What's to care about?<br />
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That's one way of looking at it. There is another. Take <i>he did something unlawful</i>, and change the last word to <i>wrong</i>. See what I did there? Move from a legal viewpoint to a <i>moral</i> one and the Bradley Manning case looks very different. Suddenly we can see how someone in Private Manning's situation - who is exposed to the reality of a military-political campaign that differs markedly from that being shown to the citizens of the United States and Britain (Bradley is a citizen of both; he was born in Wales); who witnesses the suffering inflicted on, and endured, by the people of Iraq and Afghanistan; and who became horrified at the deliberate misinformation of the folks back home by both the military and their political masters - might feel morally obligated to expose what he sees as crimes against humanity.<br />
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It seems to me that there are many wrong reasons to protest about the treatment of Bradley Manning: because he's one of your own, because he stuck it to the pricks in uniform, because he struck a blow for liberty (and you happen to believe in the power of crystal healing), because other people are protesting about it, because democracy has had its day, or because you believe in a Utopia where there are no secrets, no wars, no rulers.<br />
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But there is also a right reason: that maybe what he did was right. And if so, he has been abysmally mistreated, vilified when in truth he is a hero. I do not know if this is true. But if it is, I hope justice eventually prevails.<br />
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And that is what the poem I submitted, <i>I am not a protester</i>, says.MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-30582751862257219472012-02-20T14:58:00.000-08:002012-02-20T14:58:32.417-08:00I have fractured my creativityI attended the T. S. Eliot memorial meeting of the Royal Society of Literature tonight at Somerset House in the Strand. Anne Chisolm introduced David Harsent, Lavinia Greenlaw, Emma Jones and Ahren Warner, who read poems and discussed what it is like to 'be' a poet.<br />
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David Harsent talked about how every poet is compelled to have a day job, a proper job that provides an income, and how the tyranny of the quotidian results in 'fractured creativity.' By 'day job,' he seemed to have in mind the hell of speaking engagements and writing residencies. He should try spending eight hours a day staring at a spreadsheet. Maybe it would inspire him.<br />
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It is London Fashion Week - <i>dawn of the dud, the hip parade, top of the totty</i> - and an event was in progress in another part of Somerset House during the poetry readings. It was like listening to Vivaldi when teenagers are playing Dubstep in the next room.MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-84566843006723830672012-02-19T13:00:00.000-08:002012-02-19T13:00:04.268-08:00Back pain is not the best poetic inspirationI arrived promptly at Faber & Faber's offices at 9:45am yesterday morning for day two of a three-day poetry workshop, keen as a whippet to draw inspiration from mere proximity to Jo Shapcott and Roger McGough. (Does that sound totally sycophantic? I do hope so.) I placed my books and pen on the table. I turned to place my satchel on a spare chair and - swore unpoetically as my lower back went into spasm.<br />
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I spent the rest of the day in a state somewhere between agony and what seemed like eternal damnation. I grimaced throughout Jo and Roger's sessions and left at the end of the day unsure whether I could make it as far as the Tube station, let alone whether I could make it back the next day.<br />
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Last night I barely slept. I deferred the terror of retiring to bed as long as I dared by playing a long session of online poker with a pillow stuffed behind my spine. I finally tumbled into the sack in the early hours for a night of wakeful tossing, yelping and unrepeatable cussing. By 6am I was back on the computer typing random characters which refused to coalesce into a meaningful poetic constellation. A good friend (you know who you are, <i>Katia</i>) pointed out that all the best poets live pained lives. However I can attest that back pain is not conducive to poetic inspiration.<br />
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At 9 o'clock I packed my pillow and a day's provision of ibuprofen into a rucksack and headed out nervously for day three of the workshop.MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-77001469523911389292012-02-18T19:00:00.000-08:002012-02-19T12:20:14.234-08:00Oh, that Roger McGoughAfter lunch on Saturday our poetry workshop was led by Mr Roger McGough. There were several reasons why I should have been excited, perhaps even slightly awed, at this prospect. For one, Roger is the current president of the Poetry Society of which I am a member. (I should know this.) He is also the co-author of <i>The Mersey Sound</i>, the best (ever) selling poetry paperback in the UK. He presents <i>Poetry Please</i> on BBC Radio 4. (Where have I been?) He wrote big chunks of the dialogue for the Beatles' cartoon film <i>Yellow Submarine</i>. He was in the pop group The Scaffold which scored a number one UK chart hit in 1968 with <i>Lily the Pink</i>. He's a regular on Stephen Fry's <i>QI</i> television quiz show. He's got an effing CBE, for Christ's sake!<br />
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Oh, <i>that</i> Roger McGough.<br />
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Roger read to us several of his most celebrated (and some notorious) poems, including the stunningly satirical <i>The Lesson</i> about a schoolteacher who massacres his class, and the dark and disturbing <i>Jogger's Song</i>, as well as many of the playful and humourous poems for which he is best known. What a charming man, and what an honour to have sat at the same table.MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-64796756398852108602012-02-18T13:00:00.000-08:002012-02-19T11:55:03.825-08:00What Jo Shapcott taught meIt's impossible <i>not</i> to learn from Jo Shapcott (<i>On Mutability</i> Costa Book of the Year 2010). Our workshop group at the offices of Faber & Faber in London worked through a series of exercises during Friday afternoon. These built on the work we had done with Daljit Nagra during the morning and continued to focus on specificity and concreteness, or as Jo put it, describing 'the cuppiness of this cup.' One consequence of this was that I wrote a poem, polished later in the evening and shared on my Poetrivia blog as '<a href="http://poetrivia.blogspot.com/2012/02/in-mix.html">In the mix</a>,' that I could never otherwise have been conceived. A second poem, a sonnet called '<a href="http://poetrivia.blogspot.com/2012/02/following-poem-was-written-while.html">Getting into your pantry</a>,' further stretched my poetic range; I had been challenged by Jo to write a poem about the 'Larder of ecstasy!' Job done.<br />
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The inspiration continued on Saturday morning (despite my acute backache which is a separate story) as Jo shared a couple of tips to get the poetic motor humming. The first tip is simply to assemble a group of unrelated words to be included in a poem. They might be chosen randomly from, say, a dictionary, or you could use Wikipedia's subject of the day as a theme to mix with a subject you already having mind - the odder the better. This forces you to look for unusual and often completely novel links. The seeded words can always be edited out later (after they have done their work). Jo's second tip is a way of expanding a poem that you feel ends too soon or fails to fully mine the seam of material available. She suggests putting the poem away overnight and taking it out the next day, covering all but the last line and then <i>using that as the first line of a new poem</i>. Again, the result can be edited later and might result in a longer, richer poem, in a sequence, or in two entirely separate poems. Go Jo!MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-63807849495579710372012-02-17T13:30:00.000-08:002012-02-18T14:24:57.738-08:00What's to eat at Faber & Faber?Plenty, that's what! It's half time on day one of this three-day poetry workshop and while we await the arrival of the poetry goddess that is Jo Shapcott (<i>Of Mutability, </i>Costa Book of the Year 2011), those nice people at Faber & Faber bring out lunch. At these workshop prices you'd expect more than cheese and pickle sandwiches. Surely there should be a mustard-cress garnish at the least.<br />
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But what is this I see? Could that really be a quiche the size of hat box? Sure is. And look, its packed with mushrooms and vegetables. And there's a green salad, a rice salad, a pasta salad, a potato salad, a salad salad. And how many chickens have given their limbs in the name of poetry? Okay, cancel tonight's dinner; I'm going in...MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2542080729734136082.post-38815495733586823092012-02-17T13:00:00.000-08:002012-02-18T14:06:41.525-08:00Hobnobbing with Daljit NagraAs if taking a time off the day job isn't reward enough for a life well spent, I spent this morning at the London offices of Faber & Faber (T.S. Eliot's desk is downstairs!) rubbing up against the awesome Daljit Nagra (<i>Look We Have Coming To Dover!</i>) trying to get a faint smear of his success, if not his abundant talent, to rub off on me. Only time will tell whether that worked. My head is buzzing. I think that's probably good.<br />
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Daljit is a kind and generous teacher (even though I'm paying Faber a small fortune for this three-day workshop), but it is hard to imagine a poet further removed from the personae who narrate his poems. This is such a relief since I have no desire to write in Punglish.MrHickmotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13768869169345737317noreply@blogger.com0