The Abandonment and other stories

 It has been refreshing to get back to some Thomas Hardy short stories after the week with the Gunn letters. As I'm sure you'll know, a Hardy story is like a Hardy novel, only shorter but they are almost as good given that they don't have the same time to build their tragic dimensions.

The Gunn letters were no disappointment but they become increasingly seedy as well as libertine and a return to some decorum didn't go amiss. They also probably sank my long-term project, Wide Realm, the study of Gunn which had reached about 25 thousand words but wasn't ever really going to be necessary and seems even less so now. Its chances of seeing print were slim, it might have been a kindle but one would rather not know how much one might owe Faber for quoting lines from the books they have the rights to. Its purpose was to allow me to think I had an ongoing project and as such I could proceed with it to my own ends. I had nearly reached the point I'd arrived at in 1999 before the publication of Boss Cupid but I might be able to think up something else to do. We will have to see.

This morning, with new allusions to put into the basic idea, I re-wrote the Hammershøi poem that appeared (a long way) below here, about the painting. It's about the same painting - the one on the front room wall - but is a different poem. So I'm now surprised to find as many as nine poems in the file representing what I've done in just under three years since The Perfect Book  which isn't quite the doldrums I thought it was since four a year was always the going rate. While there might be a certain dilettante feel to being a writer who hasn't actually written much for a while, one really ought to give it a go if one can. 

The first obstacle to it is having something one cares about enough to write about, then one needs the words and the form to put them in. Counting syllables is usually the answer to the last one. Rhyme is optional but the decision needs taking early. But there aren't always as many words as one would like. I've used 'silhouette' in the new Hammershøi, having used it in the Prague Jewish Cemetery poem and once before in about 1978. It's the word I need in both cases but in such a small number of poems I can hear unsympathetic critics saying, 'he's got a thing about silhouettes'. I would notice something like that in a novel if a slightly unusual word was used on page 257 that I'd seen on page 48.

Still, I can check off the poems in the file against those that have appeared here and those that haven't, if surviving some searching readings, could go to the magazine I'd rather be in and then, failing that,  the one that might have them. It's been some time. It's been about three years. The only harm it does if my poems appear in print is that it presumably means somebody else's doesn't and it doesn't seem worth causing them disappointment when it doesn't matter to me.

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One would gladly take today's weather and cut and paste it all the way across to September. Ideal for the weekly jaunt. But there will be July and August days to suffer but, as Harry Worth would have said, things could be worse.