'Romanticisim' first draft

Not much is of more interest to me than finding three pages of Rosemary Tonks's journal on the website of Newcastle University library, seeing some of the workings of Sean O'Brien poems, where he puts the stress marks in to prove to himself he was within the parameters of iambic pentameter, or such books as Trevor Tolley's Larkin at Work, in which he makes his way through Larkin's notebooks fasitidiously uncovering the process by which the likes of Church Going and The Whitsun Weddings were arrived at.

Not always easily, it seems.

I don't mind how hard Larkin, Rosemary and Sean worked at their poems but I do have doubts about poets I have less respect for putting in painstaking work to make them look as if they arrived in a glorious blast of inspiration. Dylan Thomas is one, who Caitlin was recently on telly again saying he said could spend all day putting in or taking out a word from a line. 

I had thought that was a joke Oscar made about his extreme aestheticism but, no, it's what Dylan actually did. 

Similarly, Allen Ginsberg, apparently, maybe, reportedly, spent a lot of time making Howl look as if it was a spontaneous outburst. It either was or it wasn't. If it was, I'm bored by it; if it wasn't, he should be ashamed of himself.

I would luv it, luv it, in the words of Kevin Keegan, if I could spend weeks, months or even years making a poem better and better until it was as good as it could be. But, when would I know.

For my purposes - and my purposes are the only purposes there are- a poem can look good enough within hours, if not minutes, but certainly within a day or two. Once I like what they look like, they are done.

Romanticism was first of all a few ideas for lines written on the back of my printed-off train ticket to Netley. I did a bit more on Netley Station waiting for the train, had the line endings in before I got home, typed it up and, very unusually for me, took the advice of a friend who questioned,

gorgeous/ with tuberculosis

 

I had thought that was brilliant at first but had to change it. It became restless. I found a better title. It underwent some minor surgery. I abandoned any attempt at a rhyme scheme early doors and then sacrificed any attempt at metrics or syllable count in favour of a music of its own it might have anyway.

 

It's not obvious that any university's library is going to want to blow the very slightest part of their budget on bidding for evidence of how I wrote poems and neither would I. So, here it is anyway.

Some scribble on the reverse side of a train ticket, not wanting to waste paper, becomes a poem that does all a poem had to do. It made its author happy to have written it.