I've never been a 'natural' poet. I once read something that John Tavener had said that his head was always full of music and he just had to get it down on paper. I would be the opposite of that. My head is certainly full of words and sometimes even the occasional idea but they rarely suggest themselves as a poem that needs writing. For two or three decades now, I've accepted that if I produce four poems a year that I consider are worth keeping then I am up to speed. And they said Larkin was 'perfectionist' and frugal. And some people also said that he was any good.
This poem came as several of mine have, very tangentially. In last night's (very good) BBC remake of The Lady Vanishes, one of the well-to-do was idly reading a book and, as happens in this kind of epiphany, I saw my poem. The best previous example of this was many years ago when watching a programme about some old art masterpiece in which the commentator said, 'and in the corner there is an astrolabe by Tycho Brahe'. I couldn't concentrate on any more of the programme. There was a poem in Tycho Brahe. I think there were six or seven in the end.
And so, here we are. The ache of that feeling that it is about time one wrote a poem is over for another couple of months or more. This is only a first go and so might not pass the test of reading it again a few days later but it does a few things I like. I hope. This is supposed to be my poetry website and so it ought to have a new poem by me on it more often than it does.
But then, once in a while, I think I ought to submit a few poems to a magazine or enter a competition. And one wouldn't want to offend such stipulations as 'submissions should not have been published or appeared on the internet before'. Fair enough. Except that it leaves me with very little ammunition to send anywhere else.
Well, that is too bad.
At poetry readings, I often much prefer the introductions to poems and the poet's comments in between them to the poems themselves. Even at readings by poets I really admire. More so, if anything. And at the last meeting of the Portsmouth Poetry Society, one forthright member more or less told me to 'get on with it', saying very kindly that she 'couldn't wait' to hear the poem but really meaning, 'shut up waffling'.
We will have to agree to differ on that, my dear.
But, yes. Eventually. The poem. Lds & Gnlmn, Fiction. And, I hope you'll agree, not a remake of Larkin's poem on a similar subject. Or maybe it is.
Fiction
I read cheap novels for the
whole two weeks.
The sun shone all the time. I
went for walks.
I wondered whether to have an
affair.
I spent the evenings in a
local bar,
drinking tequila slammers
while I read,
until one night when I was
just about
to leave, a stunning blonde
in a red frock
approached and asked if I
would like a drink.
I put down my paperback while
music
by Burt Bacharach played
gently somewhere-
I don’t know where it was-
and said okay.
We talked while we sipped our
drinks, mostly in
French. She with a Russian
accent, me still
with a trace of Nottingham in mine.
And, for some reason that I
still can’t explain,
when she said she thought I
might be a spy,
I said I was but asked her
not to tell
anyone. And she said that she
had known
because she was one, too. We
danced a dance
or two to make it look as if
we were two
lonely people who had met
there and then.
But, of course, it was all
part of the plot,
and there I was again,
passwords exchanged,
trapped in a story I had read
before.