not a poem about sex

Well, my friends, this bloggers' world is a funny one. You drop these words, cyber-messages in e-bottles, out there into the world not knowing who reads them or what they make of them – except that sometimes someone tells you, and that is such a gift.

And a few of you (often bloggers yourselves, so you're kind of tuned-in to variations) have emailed to ask if I'm OK; to say that they (you)'ve noticed a subtle shift in how I'm writing and the subject matter recently. Particularly noted is that there has been less of the personal 'me' in evidence.

You astute people; no, things have not been easy chez moi, on either the personal or professional fronts recently. 'But –' you might justifiably cry 'you've had two books out recently. What more might a writer want?' And I'd respond yes, and that's great, and long-awaited; but in these days of no-one, especially small presses, having any money for promotion (and I haven't had an advance on a book in 13 years), and royalties being a tiny percentage, not of cover price as per before the Net Book Agreement, but of publishers' receipts, a very different beast, and royalties anyway being due up to a year after the book is released, I can expect a few pounds only maybe in 2012 and will need to keep doing a lot of promotion myself. So in some ways there's the post-book anticlimax (the more so since Imago was written 17 years ago, and has hardly hit the bestsellers' list – not, I hastily add, that I had any expectation that it might); plus the ongoing issue of how the hell to keep bringing in even a pittance.

And there have been a number of other more personal difficulties.

So yes there has been I guess a certain verve lacking lately: I am on my way to reclaiming it. In honour of some cathartic events which have undammed some dams, I'm going to post below a very different poem from my usual; just so you know (I perhaps mean just so I can remember!)  that I can occasionally be frivolous!

’im an’ me

I said to ’im ‘this ain’t a poem about sex’

an’ he said ‘then there’ll be a great gaping hole

at the heart of your poetry’, an’ I said

‘it’s about mortality’ an’ he said ‘sex

is an attempt to counter mortality’

an’ I declined to answer and wrote this anyway:

‘it’s like one of them chalk pavement drawings,

innit, soon to be erased by rain; and your

brain cell’s slithering away with a mind of its own

that ain’t yours’ (and he interjected that even

the slithy tove never slithered like that); ‘and

your memory was last seen packin’ a bag

and hitchin’ a lift out of here; and all them

bits that should be staring at the sky

have discovered the laws of gravity;

and you don’t know what it’s all about

and you were never sure whether there was

a God anyway; and life slips by like a field mouse

scarcely shakin’ the grasses’ (I pinched that line

from Ezra). And he said: ‘Never mind

darlin’; nothing that a cup of tea won’t sort.’

 

– Roselle Angwin