Not Single Spies

 Claudius observed how,

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

And Wendy Cope noted how men are like buses in that having waited a long time for one, a few turn up at the same time. I might add that, not having written a poem for six months, I'm very suddenly surfeited with them and aware that 'surfeit' is an exception to 'i before e except after c' so there's another torpedo in the Bismarck of those who like rules.

One poem was earlier in the week, two were this morning, two more ideas have a few lines towards making a start and a sixth is only so far a title. The example below might be doggerel but such ephemera isn't going anywhere else and so the faults in the last stanza can stay like that.

The other one completed this morning is an old idea I never got round to but was I prompted to finally knock it out because it's in the same spirit of one poem suggesting others that link the three I'm yet to attempt which are related by all means but, oh no, not a dreaded 'sequence'. It is Derrida Re-Reading 'Re-Reading Derrida on a Train' on a Train, a very 'in' joke implying the infinite possibilities of 're-reading' had I somehow miraculously seen Jacques Derrida with a copy of my 2000 booklet, Re-Reading Derrida on a Train.

It's madness, I know, but if Paul Muldoon can get away with what he does these days we might as well all indulge ourselves howsoever we choose.  And 'light verse' did Wendy no harm at all.

The prompt came from thinking there could be a poem, called Reading a History of Writing, based on reading Steven Roger Fischer's The History of Writing. I thought of Writing The History of Reading but before doing that, surely one ought to have written The History of Reading, so that's the third idea. But, here's the kicker. That could be the history of Reading in Berkshire. I know it's a bit late to be so avant-garde and ludic but, like so many of them, it's only myself I have to please by now.

So exactly what comes of this boom in creative activity very much remains to be seen. It might not generate a 'personal best' but something satisfying there is in producing anything that isn't abandoned.

--

The wireless played this this morning,

 

and, had I been on Face the Music, I could easily have jumped in thinking it was Beethoven's Grosse Fuge. Tortelier, Casals, Stern et al is a superstar line-up to rival that brilliant Menuhin-Oistrakh Bach double concerto. Such things seem to work in collaborations like this whereas a football team including Pele, George Best, Cruyff, Gullit, Cantona and Maradona surely would not. Neither would a pop group with Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Dusty Springfield, Ronnie Spector, Gladys Knight and Candi Staton. But this works fine.

I can't see D.956 on the shelves whereas there are two Grosse Fuge's. Momox can send me a disc of this that, with some compensation Amazon insisted on awarding me, will arrive for 71p.

I know that Amazon are tax avoiding rascals that exploit their employees appallingly but they treat their customers will much ingratiation. A couple of shirts I ordered recently were made in Nepal, dispatched from Leipzig and promised for Saturday delivery having only been clicked on on Friday. And because they missed that ambitious promise and only got them here by Monday, I was compensated. It didn't matter. I've not had the occasion to wear one yet. I only hope the compensation doesn't come out of the poor courier's paltry pay but it would come as no surprise if that's how Amazon works.