I'm often at a loss, though, to understand why some of these titles take quite so long from announcement to appearance. When you hear about a book you want to read, you want to read it, not recieve occasional e-mails from Amazon telling you how hard they're trying to provide it. Don't bother, it isn't in print yet.
This year should see The Perfect Book, a bit of a magnum opus for me at perhaps 25 poems, but once it is ready it will be e-mailed to the printers and a week or so later anyone who wants one can have one.I'm more excited about it than a 58 year old should be because I like it a lot. I still look at The Perfect Murder once in a while and still like that and nowadays that is all that matters. I no longer understand why anybody needs the approval or endorsement of others. Of course, the young poet might have aspirations to greatness and need to know that their work captivates other readers so that they can hope for success and acclaim but, no, that's a bit gauche, isn't it. The starting point for any poem is that it is at least as good as you thought you could do and, hopefully, better. After that it is a superfluous bonus if friends, readers or reviewers say nice things about them.
And I doubt if I'll bother with reviewers this time. Vanity, vanity, all of it vanity.
I have sent a couple of new poems off to a carefully selected magazine having dismissed most titles on account of their fussy submission rules and the wait between composition and appearing in print. I can put a poem on here in a first version as soon as it's finished but would have to wait months to see it in print. So, with some regret, Move Over, Darling and Windy Miller are in the book but won't appear here for fear of stealing anybody else's thunder and we'll see if they appear anywhere else in due course.
But if nobody else wants to write quite the same sort of casually formal, gently ironic poems that I'd like to read, I'll write them myself. And I've gone to the portentous lengths of adding an epigraph to the collection,
Being laconic did
not mean giving up on lyricism.
which, when I read it in Alice Kaplan's book on L'Etranger, made me wonder if that's something like what I do. I couildn't say but I thought I'd treat myself to such a dubious decoration just this once.News from the Jess Davies Band is that a second track towards the debut CD is a wrap. And so progress is being made on the way to becoming the merest footnote in the history of popular music with a songwriting credit on a recording. That's as exciting as could be but not currently quite as exciting as The Perfect Book. But in these matters, to travel is often better than to arrive. It's all about doing it, the potential, the forthcoming. Almost as soon as the book is done, distributed and has taken its modest place in the world, it's over, it's gone. And one is left with an empty storehouse, bereft of ammunition, with just more of a back catalogue. I'm not looking forward to that.
