Skip to main content

Postcards


(further to the last piece, it may be worthwhile pointing out that not EVERYTHING I read was ancient*)

I managed a single new poem at last week’s reading, or rather twenty odd very short new poems plucked from one longer work which is currently being tinkered with. In the finest traditions of my magpie poetics, the idea was “inspired by” (read: ripped off wholesale from) the sainted and discussed elsewhere in these pages Georges Perec.
Reading his collected short pieces Species of Spaces (take the exhortation to buy and read as read)

I was struck by a piece called Two Hundred and Forty three postcards in Real Colour (dedicated to his friend and other hero of mine, Italo Calvino). Simply put the text is the standard matter of postcards, weather, food, scenery, but the overall effect is hypnotic in its banality (and in the knowledge that, this being Perec, there’s something else entirely whirring away in the background). This evolved into 99 Postcards for Georges Perec. Me being me I am unable to match Georges’ discipline, and my efforts are altogether more absurd (at times). I’ve constrained myself further by adhering to a strict three lines per “postcard”. The brevity of the form forces you to pack a poem densely and tightly, think about each word. It’s like being back teaching first year poetry again, and getting the students writing haiku.

They seemed to go down well, and I’m pleased with how they’re shaping up. So for once, watch this space.

*why yes, I am getting round my word count constraint by using parentheses and footnotes**, well spotted
**yes, like this one

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

To all intents and purposes, a bloody great weed.

I absolutely love trees, and I get quite irate when they get cut down. One of the aspects of life with which I most often find myself most at odds with my fellow man is that I'm not really a fan of the tidy garden. I like to see a bit of biodiversity knocking about the gaff, and to that end I welcome the somewhat overgrown hedge, am pro the bit of lawn left to run riot, and, most of all, very anti cutting down trees. I love the things, habitat, provider of shade, easy on the eye, home to the songbirds that delight the ear at dawn, the best alarm clock of all. To me, cutting a naturally growing tree down is an act of errant vandalism, as well as monumental entitlement, it's been around longer than you. So, this being the case, let me say this. The public outcry over the felling of the tree at Sycamore Gap is sentimental, overblown nonsense, and the fact that the two men found guilty of it have been given a custodial sentence is completely insane. Prison? For cutting down a Sycam...
Post a Comment
Read more

Oh! Are you on the jabs?

I have never been a slender man. No one has ever looked at me and thought "oh, he needs feeding up". It's a good job for me that I was already in a relationship by the early noughties as I was never going to carry off the wasted rock star in skinny jeans look. No one has ever mistaken me for Noel Fielding. This is not to say that I'm entirely a corpulent mess. I have, at various times in my life, been in pretty good shape, but it takes a lot of hard work, and a lot of vigilance, particularly in my line of work, where temptation is never far away. Also, I reason, I have only one life to live, so have the cheese, ffs. I have often wondered what it would be like to be effortlessly in good nick, to not have to stop and think how much I really want that pie (quite a lot, obviously, pie is great), but I've long since come to terms with the fact that my default form is "lived-in". I do try to keep things under control, but I also put weight on at the mere menti...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inedible

"He says it's inedible" said my front of house manager, as she laid the half-eaten fish and chips in front of me, and instantly I relaxed.  Clearly, I observed, it was edible to some degree. I comped it, because I can't be arsed arguing the toss, and I want to make my front of house's lives as simple as possible. The haddock had been delivered that morning. The fryers had been cleaned that morning. The batter had been made that morning (and it's very good batter, ask me nicely and I'll give you the recipe some time). The fish and chips was identical to the other 27 portions I'd sent out on that lunch service, all of which had come back more or less hoovered up, we have have a (justified, if I do say so myself) very good reputation for our chips. But it was, apparently, "inedible". When it comes to complaints, less is more. If you use a hyperbolic word like that, I'll switch off, you've marked yourself as a rube, a chump, I'm not g...
Post a Comment
Read more