1. Ma bichette - 12.1.2005
Grey walls and blood-dark burgundy: Rothko
anguise, hung tastefully on dove-white Dulux;
IKEA bauhaus or Metroland retro;
mix Sixties tat with bebop cool redux.
Ma bichette, we pulled this all together,
our jumbled life, a room of stylish trash -
an item. Friends pooh-poohed the whole endeavour,
‘Trust her? Three months - she’ll dump you in a flash.’
When I wake-up, should I confess I just
pretended to pass-out so I could watch
you waltz along to Brubeck? Still nonplussed,
such fragile grace - bewildering, too much,
you dancing, wine in hand, a half-full flute,
to scratchy jazz from Capital Carboot.
‘You're off to bed?’
(I'm staying put to channel hop).
‘You go to bed
and take your book,’ (you’re so well read).
‘I’m staying put!’ (no need to strop).
‘Please let me be; don’t make me stop.’
...You go to bed.
BabeCast beauties promise to get naked -
‘just ring or text, we’re slaves to your desire.’
A hungry Fox hunts out your prejudice,
each guilty secret profits some false prophet.
‘Just ring or text', we’re slaves to your desire -
do as the celebs bid. Because you’re worth it
each guilty secret profits some false prophet.
‘Harvard seeks a fun czar,' Bill O’ Reilly quips.
Do as the celeb bids, because you’re worth it.
God TV announces Armageddon.
Harvard seeks a fun czar. Bill O’Reilly quips,
no flakey bloviators on ‘The Factor’.
God TV announces Armageddon,
each guilty secret profits some false prophet.
No flakey bloviators on The Factor,
just Babecast beauties busy getting naked.
Grey walls and blood-dark burgundy: Rothko
anguise, hung tastefully on dove-white Dulux;
IKEA bauhaus or Metroland retro;
mix Sixties tat with bebop cool redux.
Ma bichette, we pulled this all together,
our jumbled life, a room of stylish trash -
an item. Friends pooh-poohed the whole endeavour,
‘Trust her? Three months - she’ll dump you in a flash.’
When I wake-up, should I confess I just
pretended to pass-out so I could watch
you waltz along to Brubeck? Still nonplussed,
such fragile grace - bewildering, too much,
you dancing, wine in hand, a half-full flute,
to scratchy jazz from Capital Carboot.
‘You're off to bed?’
(I'm staying put to channel hop).
‘You go to bed
and take your book,’ (you’re so well read).
‘I’m staying put!’ (no need to strop).
‘Please let me be; don’t make me stop.’
...You go to bed.
BabeCast beauties promise to get naked -
‘just ring or text, we’re slaves to your desire.’
A hungry Fox hunts out your prejudice,
each guilty secret profits some false prophet.
‘Just ring or text', we’re slaves to your desire -
do as the celebs bid. Because you’re worth it
each guilty secret profits some false prophet.
‘Harvard seeks a fun czar,' Bill O’ Reilly quips.
Do as the celeb bids, because you’re worth it.
God TV announces Armageddon.
Harvard seeks a fun czar. Bill O’Reilly quips,
no flakey bloviators on ‘The Factor’.
God TV announces Armageddon,
each guilty secret profits some false prophet.
No flakey bloviators on The Factor,
just Babecast beauties busy getting naked.
2. Kyiv Chic - 7.11.2010
Since Olga occupied the studio
next door, you’ve changed. Although I’d never tell
you so, I know deep down you know I know.
Yum! Our willowy Ukrainian bombshell,
quite something, n'est-elle pas? Now what she does,
that’s all quite hazy; Slavic style guru –
she blogs as ‘Kyiv Chic’, her tweets the buzz
of Lviv café life, outrageous and untrue.
How did she reel you in - with girly cocktails,
a Brick Lane private view, a TV supper
of ‘Downton’ with Nigella style hors d’ouevre?
So what becomes of me, the token male,
the dumb, but necessary narrator,
my arc, a pre-determined downward curve?
Let’s keep it civilised, no sulks, no rows,
Just tell me what you need me to concede –
our nonchalance, in truth, masked hidden need -
was I supposed to know? IKEA Bauhaus
or bebop cool redux, I still espouse
an English martyr’s bland, old fashioned creed,
‘Let’s keep it civilised’.
Pearl-white, the buttons on your crimson blouse
not quite undone, more 'accidently’ freed –
how easily you reeled me in, my need
so palpable. You go to bed; I browse
(let’s keep it civilised).
Remote in hand, phasers set to stun,
zap the channels, cruise the final frontier,
think inside the box, who needs space - you've got Sky!
There's life in here, but not as we know it.
Zap the channels, choose your final frontier,
the future's bright, the future is deranged.
There's life in here, but not as you know it;
go boldly now, explore your strange new world.
The future's bright, the future is deranged,
there's life in here, but not as you know it.
Go boldly now, explore your strange new world -
remote in hand, phasers set to stun.
3. A Love Supreme - 9.11.2012
Now White on White not burgundy on grey;
you took both Rothkos, but left the Impulse vinyl –
Coltrane, through endless nights and empty days,
replayed. A Love Supreme, beyond the final
signature motif the line disintegrates,
his silenced sax gives way to mumbled words;
quietly on drums and bass the riff pulsates
as Tyner drizzles desolate discords.
Not burgundy on grey, but White on White.
Dawn breaks like tarnished pewter; its ashen
radiance reveals on pallid walls two slight,
square patches. Rothkos gone, implicit passion
understated. Who now asserts, ‘let’s end it?’
Instead walk out, then click FB unfriended.
Just tell me what you need me to concede –
our nonchalance, in truth, masked hidden need -
was I supposed to know? IKEA Bauhaus
or bebop cool redux, I still espouse
an English martyr’s bland, old fashioned creed,
‘Let’s keep it civilised’.
Pearl-white, the buttons on your crimson blouse
not quite undone, more 'accidently’ freed –
how easily you reeled me in, my need
so palpable. You go to bed; I browse
(let’s keep it civilised).
Remote in hand, phasers set to stun,
zap the channels, cruise the final frontier,
think inside the box, who needs space - you've got Sky!
There's life in here, but not as we know it.
Zap the channels, choose your final frontier,
the future's bright, the future is deranged.
There's life in here, but not as you know it;
go boldly now, explore your strange new world.
The future's bright, the future is deranged,
there's life in here, but not as you know it.
Go boldly now, explore your strange new world -
remote in hand, phasers set to stun.
3. A Love Supreme - 9.11.2012
Now White on White not burgundy on grey;
you took both Rothkos, but left the Impulse vinyl –
Coltrane, through endless nights and empty days,
replayed. A Love Supreme, beyond the final
signature motif the line disintegrates,
his silenced sax gives way to mumbled words;
quietly on drums and bass the riff pulsates
as Tyner drizzles desolate discords.
Not burgundy on grey, but White on White.
Dawn breaks like tarnished pewter; its ashen
radiance reveals on pallid walls two slight,
square patches. Rothkos gone, implicit passion
understated. Who now asserts, ‘let’s end it?’
Instead walk out, then click FB unfriended.
I wake downstairs, last night’s events a haze,
(friends text to say,’ Despair is just a phase.’
Reply, ’Cut me some slack. So what - I’m bitter!’)
It’s 5am., still BabeCast beauties glitter
seductively in burlesque bustiers -
turn- off, too much. I browse through last month’s Sundays -
count-up your column inches; endless days
and empty nights I watch you trend on Twitter,
awake downstairs.
Life-style pullouts trade their cutest clichés -
‘BELLES OF SHOREDITCH STRIKE IT RICH!’ OK's -
‘CAMDEN TRASH - NEW EUROPE’S BIGGEST HITTERS’
Graze the web, search Zoopla’s cheapest bedsitters,
or doze from ‘Andrew Marr’ through ‘Songs of Praise’,
then wake downstairs.
There's life in here, not that you'd know it:
One response to not being able to write a a word is try to keep your hand in by revisiting abandoned or undeveloped material from previous years. The repeated pantoums which form the latter part of each section of 'Trio' can be dated fairly precisely to this news item from 2005.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/1/21/fun-czar-corker-subject-of-media/
Now it may come as a bit of a surprise to learn that I am not a regular reader of 'The Harvard Crimson'. I must have picked the story up while browsing through the Sky Channels and happening on Bill O'Reilly ranting on Fox's 'The Factor'. Every so often when we had Sky I might take a late night trip through some of the more wild and woolly offerings beyond the strictly vanilla sections of entertainment, sport and news/documentary. Perusing Sky's various shopping, fashion and religious channels will definitely persuade you that exoticism today lies within the mundane. Why do stick-thin models adopt a bizarre, jerky robotic gait and zombie expression while parading Dior's latest down the catwalk?
Five minutes surfing through satellite TV's 'God Channels' will convince you that its raving evangelical presenters should actually be locked-up for their own and society's future well-being. I just typed TV. evangelist into Google image - they're all here, the wild eyed patriarch, a closet child molester, bible waving pulpit thumper, toupeed prophet and sinister Mr. Nice Guy. My favorite has to be the young man in the bottom row who seems to believe that dyeing his hair to colour-coordinate with the cover of 'The New American Bible' somehow makes him appear more Godly.
Clicking through the channels, moving swiftly past mindless shopping sites such as 'Pavers Shoes TV,' dodging the dubious allure of Sky Poker or Psychic Today, pausing briefly to dig some 'Islamic Spiritual Edutainment' on 'Peace TV'..........
persist long enough and eventually you will reach the dark, dismal streets of Sky's red-light district.
Before Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter promoted the sleazy art of 'sexting' as a mass teenage participation sport an even sleazier adult version of it existed and still exists among the bizarre offerings in Sky's '900's area. Channels such as 'Babestation' and 'Babecast' are truly wierd and it has to be said completely dispiriting, Here's the schtick - take one dark, claustrophobic studio with a single camera, one couch (pink fluffy sheets) and black backdrop with garish strip-lights, add one age-worn porn star armed with mobile phone, racily clad in black PVC or insufficient lace faking an orgasm badly - then simply invite lonely males to phone-in premium rate to persuade said actress to do something more edgy. That's it, beamed from Holland to avoid Ofqual regulations, day after day, 24/7: http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/03/dutch-tv-porn-cant-be-stopped/
Adam Curtis' documentaries such as 'Century of the Self and 'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace' explore how Freudian notions relating to wish fulfillment and sublimated human desire have been purloined by PR, big business and more latterly political parties in Western democracies to promote products, ideas and policies which manipulate the largely unsuspecting consumer and voter. The internet's global reach, turbo-driven through social media, develops this unseen manipulation to ever greater levels of sophistication. Babecast may be a blatant and graphic example of making money from reselling desire back to the naive, but every 'pop-up' ad. that drops into your Youtube search, every unsolicited email offering you products based on your Google history or Amazon's 'helpful' people like you also bought this - all of these are trying to sell your desires and aspirations back to you to make a heap of money for tax avoidant multinationals on the way.
In the intervening eight years between now and when I originally experimented with the pantoum form in 'Skytalk' the internet has become even more dominated by big corporations and policed covertly by various intelligence services. Stories which I would have dismissed a year ago as conspiracy theory now turn out to be fact. Quietly and without much debate or protest we have simply given up on the idea of privacy and seem resigned to living under the spotlight of electronic surveillance. It does seem like the stuff of the dystopian novel, an amalgam of Brave New World and Big Brother .
So when I came to re-read my pantoum last September I thought, 'this does have something about it but reads like a fragment or an experiment. Looking for some advice I posted the original piece onto the Sonnet Board. Mike Alexander came back straightaway with some thoughtful feedback.
I think you could give this MORE room, take a more cinematic approach to your character. Pull the camera's eye back a little, to show him punching the remote. I agree there are possibilities to this. Unfortunately, the form is none too forgiving. What about a suite, where you have a brief quatrain of narrative, then a few stanzas of pantoum, click back & forth, &... end on a sonnet? Piece of cake, right?
What Mike offered as advice, I took as a commission. Within a couple of weeks I'd worked the 'Skytalk' pantoums into a more complex piece of flash fiction in verse running to over 120 lines.
The new material was simply worked up from fragments to hand and snippets of recent experience.
1. Ma Bichette
The title and the protagonist's pet name for his French girl friend were sparked-off from reading a piece on-line about different cultures' common terms of endearment. A bit more research around the French term 'ma bichette' - my little doe - revealed that in the 80's 'biche' had been used as a euphemism for lesbian. I had already decided that Mr. Couch Potato was going to be cuckolded by his girlfriend's lesbian affair, so that all worked in nicely.
The 'decor' - 'grey walls and blood-dark burgundy - is based on a photograph I took part way through redecorating our living room - pale grey paint, Rothko on the wall, Ikea 'bauhaus' sofas, but still the Laura Ashley burgundy curtains.
Around the time I'd been listening to quite a bit of 1950's Jazz, transitional stuff from be-bop to full-on modern, Early Brubeck featured quite a lot. Everything else - pure fiction!
2. Kviv Chic
The idea that Olga may be a a young Ukrainian cultural commentator living in London probably reflects all the time I spent over the summer of 2012 watching European Championship matches beamed from Lviv. I discovered from the pre-match shots of fans drinking in the cafes that the city was a beautiful baroque gem rather than the grim Stalinist concrete jungle I had imagined. Our whole perception of Eastern Europe is slowly changing as these countries join the EU. Suddenly we find most of the people serving us in restaurants are charming young women from Gdansk and other variants of the stereotypical tall, athletic, Slavic blonde are beamed into our living rooms via Eurovision or Wimbledon.
Why Olga? Well I needed a trochaic beat! I checked out that there were as many Ukrainian Olgas as Russian by typing 'Olga Ukraine' into Google images and indeed, there are many. If you turn your security settings up to far enough some of them are even wearing clothes.
The studio mentioned in the poem and the general 'urban chic' ambiance comes from visiting Sarah and her boyfriend Rob who were living in the Victoria Park area of East London. One Sunday morning we walked through the park to the 'Elbow' cafe for brunch, rubbing shoulders with skinny creative types exercising pugs or taking little Jake and Jemma to the swings. It was then that I decided on the overall story.
3. A Love Supreme.
About a year ago we sold our collection of 250 or so vinyl albums figuring that without a functioning turntable the discs were just gathering dust in the attic. A tad premature perhaps as just a few months later Sarah started talking about buying a turntable and new copies of some of the mid 70's albums that we had only just rid ourselves of. The analogue sound and album cover art was apparently now considered 'vintage' and albums such as Fleetwood Mac's 'Rumours', only recently lambasted as being the pinnacle of cheesy white trash rock suddenly were deemed 'old-skool' and therefore, cool. So, Mr Couch Potato, Trio's protagonist, had to be a collector of car-boot vinyl, though given his sleazebag personality, I made jazz his thing.
Dumped and alone who else would he turn to but Miles or Coltrane? In the guise of the protagonist I listened to a lot of Coltrane on YouTube as I wrote part 3.
Now, almost a year on, three things strike me about these poems. Firstly, in some ways they are a culmination of much that I've written up until now: they are narratives; traditional form mixes with urban slang; the plot is centred around a doomed love affair; the internet and cyberspace are used as a narrative device - all of this I have done before, often. As Mike Alexander commented. 'I love the way you are obsessed with your obsessions'. The second point concerns the protagonist, who is, we have to admit, a bit of a sleazebag. As the poem says:
So what becomes of me, the token male,
the dumb, but necessary narrator,
my arc, a pre-determined downward curve?
Well what becomes of him is that he gets totally humiliated. After a few months of 'R&R I am quite shocked at just what a dark place I ended up in last year. The experience of being manoeuvred into a position where voluntary redundancy seemed the only way out of my situation at work took a heavy toll. Being forced to compete for what in effect was my own job, then losing, was a deeply humiliating experience. Equally, having responsibility for the college which I had worked so hard to mould into an inclusive. lively and humane place of learning, simply taken from me and tuned over to new owners who shared few of those values left me utterly bereft. I realised even at at the time that all this was making me 'mentally unwell'. I think the protagonist's 'pre-determined downward curve' reflects a fictionalised version of my own inner state and the ease with which I wrote the new material reveals the vehemence of my negative feelings about the my situation.
The third point is that actually, I still think that this needs further work, particularly the original pantoums. I'm trying to get them down to just three stanzas rather than four; that way I could reduce the whole thing to below 120 lines which means I could use it in the forthcoming Manchester Writing Competition. First prize, £10,000 - worth a punt I think!
(friends text to say,’ Despair is just a phase.’
Reply, ’Cut me some slack. So what - I’m bitter!’)
It’s 5am., still BabeCast beauties glitter
seductively in burlesque bustiers -
turn- off, too much. I browse through last month’s Sundays -
count-up your column inches; endless days
and empty nights I watch you trend on Twitter,
awake downstairs.
Life-style pullouts trade their cutest clichés -
‘BELLES OF SHOREDITCH STRIKE IT RICH!’ OK's -
‘CAMDEN TRASH - NEW EUROPE’S BIGGEST HITTERS’
Graze the web, search Zoopla’s cheapest bedsitters,
or doze from ‘Andrew Marr’ through ‘Songs of Praise’,
then wake downstairs.
Zap the channels, cruise your final frontier:
Babecast beauties threaten to get naked,
on Fashion TV robots stalk the catwalk,
Babecast beauties threaten to get naked,
on Fashion TV robots stalk the catwalk,
the future’s trite, the
future is deranged.
Babecast beauties threaten to go native,
a strange new world becomes your living tomb,
a strange new world becomes your living tomb,
their future’s trite, your future is deranged
just ring or text, then slaver your desires.
just ring or text, then slaver your desires.
Their strange new world becomes your living tomb -
there's life out there, not that you'd know it;
just ring or text, then slaver your desires,
go with the flow, you’ve seen it all before.
there's life out there, not that you'd know it;
just ring or text, then slaver your desires,
go with the flow, you’ve seen it all before.
Babecast beauties threaten to get naked,
go with the flow, you’ve seen it all before -
the future's trite, the future is arranged.
go with the flow, you’ve seen it all before -
the future's trite, the future is arranged.
One response to not being able to write a a word is try to keep your hand in by revisiting abandoned or undeveloped material from previous years. The repeated pantoums which form the latter part of each section of 'Trio' can be dated fairly precisely to this news item from 2005.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/1/21/fun-czar-corker-subject-of-media/
Now it may come as a bit of a surprise to learn that I am not a regular reader of 'The Harvard Crimson'. I must have picked the story up while browsing through the Sky Channels and happening on Bill O'Reilly ranting on Fox's 'The Factor'. Every so often when we had Sky I might take a late night trip through some of the more wild and woolly offerings beyond the strictly vanilla sections of entertainment, sport and news/documentary. Perusing Sky's various shopping, fashion and religious channels will definitely persuade you that exoticism today lies within the mundane. Why do stick-thin models adopt a bizarre, jerky robotic gait and zombie expression while parading Dior's latest down the catwalk?
Five minutes surfing through satellite TV's 'God Channels' will convince you that its raving evangelical presenters should actually be locked-up for their own and society's future well-being. I just typed TV. evangelist into Google image - they're all here, the wild eyed patriarch, a closet child molester, bible waving pulpit thumper, toupeed prophet and sinister Mr. Nice Guy. My favorite has to be the young man in the bottom row who seems to believe that dyeing his hair to colour-coordinate with the cover of 'The New American Bible' somehow makes him appear more Godly.
Clicking through the channels, moving swiftly past mindless shopping sites such as 'Pavers Shoes TV,' dodging the dubious allure of Sky Poker or Psychic Today, pausing briefly to dig some 'Islamic Spiritual Edutainment' on 'Peace TV'..........
persist long enough and eventually you will reach the dark, dismal streets of Sky's red-light district.
Before Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter promoted the sleazy art of 'sexting' as a mass teenage participation sport an even sleazier adult version of it existed and still exists among the bizarre offerings in Sky's '900's area. Channels such as 'Babestation' and 'Babecast' are truly wierd and it has to be said completely dispiriting, Here's the schtick - take one dark, claustrophobic studio with a single camera, one couch (pink fluffy sheets) and black backdrop with garish strip-lights, add one age-worn porn star armed with mobile phone, racily clad in black PVC or insufficient lace faking an orgasm badly - then simply invite lonely males to phone-in premium rate to persuade said actress to do something more edgy. That's it, beamed from Holland to avoid Ofqual regulations, day after day, 24/7: http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/03/dutch-tv-porn-cant-be-stopped/
Adam Curtis' documentaries such as 'Century of the Self and 'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace' explore how Freudian notions relating to wish fulfillment and sublimated human desire have been purloined by PR, big business and more latterly political parties in Western democracies to promote products, ideas and policies which manipulate the largely unsuspecting consumer and voter. The internet's global reach, turbo-driven through social media, develops this unseen manipulation to ever greater levels of sophistication. Babecast may be a blatant and graphic example of making money from reselling desire back to the naive, but every 'pop-up' ad. that drops into your Youtube search, every unsolicited email offering you products based on your Google history or Amazon's 'helpful' people like you also bought this - all of these are trying to sell your desires and aspirations back to you to make a heap of money for tax avoidant multinationals on the way.
In the intervening eight years between now and when I originally experimented with the pantoum form in 'Skytalk' the internet has become even more dominated by big corporations and policed covertly by various intelligence services. Stories which I would have dismissed a year ago as conspiracy theory now turn out to be fact. Quietly and without much debate or protest we have simply given up on the idea of privacy and seem resigned to living under the spotlight of electronic surveillance. It does seem like the stuff of the dystopian novel, an amalgam of Brave New World and Big Brother .
So when I came to re-read my pantoum last September I thought, 'this does have something about it but reads like a fragment or an experiment. Looking for some advice I posted the original piece onto the Sonnet Board. Mike Alexander came back straightaway with some thoughtful feedback.
I think you could give this MORE room, take a more cinematic approach to your character. Pull the camera's eye back a little, to show him punching the remote. I agree there are possibilities to this. Unfortunately, the form is none too forgiving. What about a suite, where you have a brief quatrain of narrative, then a few stanzas of pantoum, click back & forth, &... end on a sonnet? Piece of cake, right?
What Mike offered as advice, I took as a commission. Within a couple of weeks I'd worked the 'Skytalk' pantoums into a more complex piece of flash fiction in verse running to over 120 lines.
The new material was simply worked up from fragments to hand and snippets of recent experience.
1. Ma Bichette
The title and the protagonist's pet name for his French girl friend were sparked-off from reading a piece on-line about different cultures' common terms of endearment. A bit more research around the French term 'ma bichette' - my little doe - revealed that in the 80's 'biche' had been used as a euphemism for lesbian. I had already decided that Mr. Couch Potato was going to be cuckolded by his girlfriend's lesbian affair, so that all worked in nicely.
The 'decor' - 'grey walls and blood-dark burgundy - is based on a photograph I took part way through redecorating our living room - pale grey paint, Rothko on the wall, Ikea 'bauhaus' sofas, but still the Laura Ashley burgundy curtains.
 |
| grey walls and blood-dark burgundy |
2. Kviv Chic
The idea that Olga may be a a young Ukrainian cultural commentator living in London probably reflects all the time I spent over the summer of 2012 watching European Championship matches beamed from Lviv. I discovered from the pre-match shots of fans drinking in the cafes that the city was a beautiful baroque gem rather than the grim Stalinist concrete jungle I had imagined. Our whole perception of Eastern Europe is slowly changing as these countries join the EU. Suddenly we find most of the people serving us in restaurants are charming young women from Gdansk and other variants of the stereotypical tall, athletic, Slavic blonde are beamed into our living rooms via Eurovision or Wimbledon.
Why Olga? Well I needed a trochaic beat! I checked out that there were as many Ukrainian Olgas as Russian by typing 'Olga Ukraine' into Google images and indeed, there are many. If you turn your security settings up to far enough some of them are even wearing clothes.
The studio mentioned in the poem and the general 'urban chic' ambiance comes from visiting Sarah and her boyfriend Rob who were living in the Victoria Park area of East London. One Sunday morning we walked through the park to the 'Elbow' cafe for brunch, rubbing shoulders with skinny creative types exercising pugs or taking little Jake and Jemma to the swings. It was then that I decided on the overall story.
 |
| It was in these canal-side apartments here on Grove Road that I placed Olga's studio. |
 |
| Cafe life in Victoria Park village. |
 |
| Rob & Sarah, my cultural advisers outside the Elbow cafe |
About a year ago we sold our collection of 250 or so vinyl albums figuring that without a functioning turntable the discs were just gathering dust in the attic. A tad premature perhaps as just a few months later Sarah started talking about buying a turntable and new copies of some of the mid 70's albums that we had only just rid ourselves of. The analogue sound and album cover art was apparently now considered 'vintage' and albums such as Fleetwood Mac's 'Rumours', only recently lambasted as being the pinnacle of cheesy white trash rock suddenly were deemed 'old-skool' and therefore, cool. So, Mr Couch Potato, Trio's protagonist, had to be a collector of car-boot vinyl, though given his sleazebag personality, I made jazz his thing.
Dumped and alone who else would he turn to but Miles or Coltrane? In the guise of the protagonist I listened to a lot of Coltrane on YouTube as I wrote part 3.
Now, almost a year on, three things strike me about these poems. Firstly, in some ways they are a culmination of much that I've written up until now: they are narratives; traditional form mixes with urban slang; the plot is centred around a doomed love affair; the internet and cyberspace are used as a narrative device - all of this I have done before, often. As Mike Alexander commented. 'I love the way you are obsessed with your obsessions'. The second point concerns the protagonist, who is, we have to admit, a bit of a sleazebag. As the poem says:
So what becomes of me, the token male,
the dumb, but necessary narrator,
my arc, a pre-determined downward curve?
Well what becomes of him is that he gets totally humiliated. After a few months of 'R&R I am quite shocked at just what a dark place I ended up in last year. The experience of being manoeuvred into a position where voluntary redundancy seemed the only way out of my situation at work took a heavy toll. Being forced to compete for what in effect was my own job, then losing, was a deeply humiliating experience. Equally, having responsibility for the college which I had worked so hard to mould into an inclusive. lively and humane place of learning, simply taken from me and tuned over to new owners who shared few of those values left me utterly bereft. I realised even at at the time that all this was making me 'mentally unwell'. I think the protagonist's 'pre-determined downward curve' reflects a fictionalised version of my own inner state and the ease with which I wrote the new material reveals the vehemence of my negative feelings about the my situation.
The third point is that actually, I still think that this needs further work, particularly the original pantoums. I'm trying to get them down to just three stanzas rather than four; that way I could reduce the whole thing to below 120 lines which means I could use it in the forthcoming Manchester Writing Competition. First prize, £10,000 - worth a punt I think!
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