In the foyer of the English department was a large noticeboard where students could pin up their poems and musings, in a collage of careless scribblings on paper and more earnest typed pages that took themselves far more seriously. Roughly 99.8% were rubbish. Most sensitive poetic souls (wisely) published their work unsigned, as most poems were covered over in scathing comments, palimpsests of abuse.
Pennies in the Dross
The nice ones would catch your gaze like a bright penny in the grass. They’d pull you in for a moment, into their world of trenchant lines, or transporting paragraphs. Dave Fair's stand out in memory. I recognised his handwriting on some great little anonymous poems that’d pull you right in. I can’t recall any to repeat here, but I do remember an ending I liked:
“… and always
the wall pushes me
back into the sea,
where i was mad.”
Well, I thought it was pretty deep at the time.
Found Genius?
I found some of my first year poems the other day, in an old box of letters, photos, and keepsakes. Excited, I scanned the pages for transporting evocations of distant afternoons, campus perves freeze-framed in polaroids of ink, or just the roiling throes of the melodrama of my 19 years, seen from the mast I’d lashed myself to.
Dog Vomit Omelette
No such luck. Page after page was indecipherable, ham-fistedly scribbled dross. In my earnest attempts at a pastiche of Smiths’ lyrics, Bob Dylan, and T.S. Eliot, I’d created a dog vomit omelette of trite shite. I showed my ‘work’ to Dave Fair once (and only once). He hmmmed through a few of them, and with an eventual, defeated sigh, he said, “That line there" (somewhere in 16 pages of foolscap) "has got…something. Needs work though".
7 comments:
Nice post once again Tim. I must commend your astounding memory, particularly for a poem I had completely forgotten! Did I really criticise your work?! How awful of me - I really was a pretentious bastard then.
I remember taking my sheaf of poems to Ron Hall for his opinion. He read them with so much respect and compassion, despite their floridly confessional and adolescent subject matter - and lack of any real poetic merit. We discussed the subtle differences between feeling "unwanted" and "unwantable".
I remember one comic poem I wrote garnered a surprising amount of positive reviews from the wall critics. It included a line: "Delving into the nostrils of your life to find gnarled little lumps of hate". (!)
The poetry wall could never happen today, with internet bulletin boards and a global audience of anonymous posters.
I was going to leave a comment. But your word verification thingi says nuratis. Is there anything to add to that?
Dave, I vaguely remember that comment about the gnarled lumps of hate. Good god. (no it wasn't me!). I was never brave enough to put anything on that wall. Those comments shocked the hell out of me. They gave me nuratis.
Tim your posts are fab.
I only wrote poetry because of nuratis. It is the only thing that took the nuratis away.
Well, I re-read my scrapbook the other day, and my scribblings were so full of agonisingly bad nuratis that I'm hugely relieved I never dared put any of them up on the Wall! I think they helped me process some stuff at the time, but I would never have dared put them up for public scrutiny and comment. Ha! I must have had at least a modicum of common sense.
My word verification is zingh - the opposite of nuratis and something my just-post-adolescent poetry lacked completely.
Keep the posts coming Tim - I missed them during the gap while you were presumably off confronting wildlife!
I remember some dreadful doggerel I stuck up once, about shooting a white dove. roundly mocked, it were. My word verif is oranz...
heres one for you:
alpha is a place
where people greet by yawning
and time disintegrates
in evervescent fractals
as with a smile
you realise yourself
like a stone
skipped through time and roving...
shroooooom
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