Knowing the Type

I’m the first to admit that I’m my own worst enemy and certainly over the last couple of days I’ve been kicking myself, thinking I’ve set myself a bigger challenge that I can meet…

In one of my ‘Oh, I’ve got a good idea’ moments, I decided to write a poem for each card in the D.O. What was I thinking? I know nothing of poetry!!! Occasionally, I’m an accidental poet as I word vomit and it lands on the page in pretty shapes that please my eye… But an intentional poet? Hmmm…

Ok, I decided to cheat a little… within the D.O. notes there was already one accidental poem…I’d scoop that up and I’ll pretend it has been created through deliberate design… Would I get away that? Yes… I think so… People who read poems are much smarter than me, they’ll assume I’m clever and project their own genius on to my words… I think that sounds like a good plan? No? Yeah…?

I recalled watching a documentary… I’m kicking myself again as I forget the name of the poet and that’s pretty shameful as he’s very famous and it’s a name I should know! But anyway, his poetry is on the national curriculum and he was speaking of a time when he decided to help his daughter with her homework. He’d explained at great length what his poem meant and why it had been written. She shot him down with – No! You’re wrong, it doesn’t mean that at all! None of that is the study notes!

I’m a lazy person… I store such memories and keep them up my sleeve as justi-fictions for future lazinesses… Anyway right or wrong in my logic, it’s neither here nor there. I stole my own accidental poem and intentionally placed it into the template for my new writings… I was no longer staring into the void of the blank page… Things were officially started…

Poem number 2 completed yesterday was a bit trickier to land… I was consciously trying to vomit words… I vomitted in messy handwritten scrawls and crossing outs… I know there’s rules to poems… I don’t know what those rules are… I knew I wanted 3 verses… I knew I wanted 4 lines in each… The first and last lines of each chunk came fairly easily after I fell asleep on the sofa and Woody decided to walk across my chest and land his ginger body across my neck, stuffing his wet pink nose into my right nostril, filling it with cat food fragranced purrs… I shocked out of sleep with a cry of Cock-a-doodle DON’T! Instantly, I had half my of my poem almost there…

But those middle lines… How the fuck were they going to happen? Words, words, everywhere… I sifted through piles of paper, picking and culling… a new page and words through to the next round… again and again… FFS?! How do people do this on purpose? I got a flashback… I remembered many years ago walking in on Mr S sat on our bed… of catching him in the act with his other great love… I’d caught him in flagrante lyric writing… I’d quizzed him – What are you doing? He’d said he was writing lyrics but this didn’t add up as there were no words… just a series of dashes… lines and lines of dashes… I prompted him to explain and he told me how the rhythm comes first, you find the beat, you mark that down then you bend the words to fit…

I gave it a blast… How odd… It worked…

Lines were filled… though I still wasn’t happy…. moved into type they kind of looked the right shape… His Lordship came in from work and I was still in airhead mode so didn’t reply when he spoke… He spoke louder and complained that I never speak to him! I told him that I’d been speaking with him all day and said his lesson on lyric writing had been most useful. I asked him – That was you wasn’t it? I’ve not got that memory muddled with something else? He said that yes, that was indeed the way he wrought lyrics… He then went on to tell me that he then used to always type them up on an old typewriter as handwritten scribbles always look like crap. They never look like lyrics until they’re properly spaced out…

Ok… so maybe I’m not so stupid afterall. He wanted to read my words. I printed them off and waited for his scythe to swing… Expecting him to say that it sounded like a silly nursery rhyme, I watched his face slowly gearing up to speak… Yes, yes… I like that… It’s very you!

It’s very me? What’s that supposed to mean?

Like you’ve condensed one of your blog posts… all that prose you write, boiled down to a poem…

What prose? Have you been reading the right blog?

Yes… I often read it!

Oh! I don’t!

That causes him much mirth and when he finally stops laughing, he says ‘ I can’t say I blame you! I read some of it, I don’t read all of it. You’re a bit fucking arty at times!’

That causes me much mirth and my laughter is brought to abrupt halt when he says ‘ I really love that last line. It’s like a clever crossword clue. What’s the answer? What did you anagram to get that?’

No… That’s straight to page, no clever process, no anagram involved…

He’s not convinced… Yeah, come on! That’s an anagram of something… What’s hidden in there?

I’m not in the mood to argue so I pull up an anagram site and enter the final words… Is the internet down? I try again… Nothing… I switch site… Nothing… I’m baffled… I mess about with anagrams all the time and for the first time ever, I manage to find an un-anagram-able sentence?!

Perfect! I now don’t have the problem of trying to decide if my intentional poem will survive the edits… It’s birthed a freak of nature un-fucking-anagram-able punchline… It stays for that alone!

2 down… 20 to go…

This morning, I think to myself…Ok… 20 to go… How can I make this easier? I remember that I have a backcatalogue of wordplay noodlings that I blogged a while back , the same sort of time I was working on the artwork for D.O. Ah! Result! another one off the list! I find a perfect fit and laugh that I’m surprised as I definitely wrote Grave Churnings on the back of thoughts that came as I drew out Carpe Momenti Mori… 19 to go…

A bit more sifting and I find that I can splice 2 together to tick another off my list… ?18? to go?

I scroll on…. nah….nah… nah… crap… meh….OH! BWA HAHAHAHA!

A RANTRA!

Oh, I’d forgotten I’d written that! That was the day that someone asked me why I don’t go to yoga classes anymore… On the spot, I gave an evasive answer about classes not really being my thing and for a non-competive exercise, hmmm… you get some odd dynamics going on… I’d sooner do my stretches in private…

I remember heading home and my head filling with old faces from classes… I remembered sitting in workshops… Rooms full of angry women feigning sweetness… I got home and I had to defrag my brain… and let it out… If you’ve met the type, then you’ll know the type… You’ll also have heard Ah… A Nam-nasty Monologue…

(That one’s not going in!) I’m still on 18? 19? to go…