I have no idea where to go after The Perfect Book. It doesn't even occur to me to write a poem at the moment. If that wasn't some sort of statement, post-ironic, intertextual, embracing cliché, literary to a giddy aunt's satisfaction, I make the point further by dishing out copies to anybody who will take one and sending out no review copies and doing no promoting whatsoever. It's very much like being a vegetarian, not trying to take a moral stand, just trying to do the right thing if one can but still guilty of an interminable list of things some people things are offences.Like showing off by writing poems at all.
Well, they can deal with things like that. But I can't think of any possible way that Pink Floyd are better than Cliff Richard and so I retain the moral high ground as far as I'm concerned..
But one can't give everything all up at once. Horse racing's gone. I can't turn back the tide any more than King Canute could. I've given them plenty back but can keep the Complete Works of Buxtehude, the suit now shabby, the painting and a few other trophies from the winning years. But I can't quite give up writing poems even if they are only 'derived from the derivative'.
Door Revisited
Last
Friday I had a new back door.
I
should have had one long before
But
I’m not quick on the uptake,
Don’t
do such things for their own sake
So
waited til it fell to bits,
Became
urgent and that’s why it’s
Much
more loved than it might have been.
I
painted it myself. You’ve seen,
Above,
the piece I quote. I can’t
Pretend
it’s something by Rembrandt
Or
one by Michelangelo.
It’s
White Chess Set, Yoko Ono.
Footnote.
Unlike William Empson and T.S. Eliot, I prefer it if poems can survive on their own terms without large amounts of addenda. But this is Yoko's White Chess Set, a powerful, if flawed, anti-racist
polemic, just in case you are not aware of it.
Yoko is much maligned for her role in bringing The Beatles to an early end. But I'm on her side. The Beatles might have been even better if she'd turned up sooner.