There are, I’m told, lots of things in
these poems that poems don’t usually contain: carpets, spaghetti, Crispy
Ambulance singles, Preston Bus Station, urban regeneration companies, pop
songs, gym treadmills, football grounds, barm cakes, burnt aduki beans, burning
horses, typographical error puns.... I am always surprised by how surprised
people are by these things.
The poems are not ‘about’ those things -
they just use them as the material, towards their ideas. There are poems about
birth, death, aging, love, lust and the bits before, after and in-between, the
impermanence of things, politics, social change and the impulse to make poems
in the first place. Surprisingly traditional stuff perhaps.
The poems are deliberately various in
style, form and tone. I needed to create a kind of massive collage of poems and
sequences to contain the many shades of experience of a real life. I like all
kinds of music – why not Bill Monroe next to Steve Reich, eh? - and get easily
bored with proficiency, so the search for ‘a voice’ has never interested me
lately. Let’s be plural, as Bob Perelman almost says in one of the epigraphs.
I similarly favour the poem over the facts,
hence another epigraph from literary godfathers the Three Stooges – ‘any
resemblance between the characters in this picture and any persons, living or dead, is a
miracle’. But then, Moe, Larry and Curly and my Dad know the truth hiding behind
that disclaimer.
My title could have come from any of the
three new sequences. The Dunno Elegies
(a pun on Rilke’s Duino Elegies) would have suggested uncertainty and
the notes of loss, but felt a bit ‘sadder’ than I wanted. Esperanto Anonyme would also have had a kind of black-humoured-doomed-to-failure-ambition
- talking to people of all tongues, without imposing your ego – how great would
that be? Next time, next time…
In the end, though, this collection comes
from a lyrical impulse to ‘learn to sing’ whatever happens. Making these poems
sing is the best way I know to make sense of how my life connects to the world
around it and within it. I want people to feel better for reading these poems: lighter,
more amused, more positively puzzled, more stimulated, more recognised, less unusual,
less alone. But as the title poem suggests, sometimes you have to turn into a
seagull to learn how to sing…
No comments:
Post a Comment