1969
For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him. As long as a human being has his intellect in his possession he will always lack the power to make poetry or sing prophecy'
(Plato 'Ion')
I'm writing what will be a long poem called '1969'. 'Gospel', the poem with the refrain Mama there aint no such thing as sin was significant in that it marked the beginning of what I'm calling an 'autobiographical turn' in my project. By this I mean a realisation that not only do I have a wealth of material to draw on from my own experience, but that my project now demands that I use it. For example, there's a sense in which the exploration of my chosen theme, that of the male body as the object of the artist's or the voyeur's gaze, would not have been complete if I had not, at some stage, turned that gaze onto my own body and objectified, eroticised, myself. This, in turn, has led me to want to explore such questions as:
In what sense is my body me?
How are my desires, as a gay man, different to a woman's?
Are there insights available to a gay man, which are not available to a straight man?
How do my desires define me? Debase me? Exalt me?
In what sense am I masculine?
Exploring these questions through my writing - and in relation to my own life - has become, inevitably, a kind of 'coming out' or confessional process. In fact, more accurately, one could say a 'self-absolutory' process, in that, on some level, I feel that this project is an absolving of myself from the so-called 'sin' of homosexuality and the guilt I have inherited from two obvious spheres of influence in my own life: my grandmother, and her working class Methodist puritanism, and the Baha'i Faith, which I joined seventeen years ago (and still haven't officially left) with its paradoxical mixture of inclusivity and homophobia.
'Absolve' comes from 'solvere': 'to loose'. I like that. This project is setting me loose from those influences...
I want '1969' to be an ontology of all this guilt, centering on the guilt my own mum felt in connection with my conception and how this guilt got passed down to me like an evil strand of DNA, how even in recent years I've been dealing with its consequences. This is why I wanted '1969' to run through the actual form of the whole poem by having lines of 1, then 9, then 6, then 9 syllables, such that even when it seems to move on chronologically and thematically, speaking of different, more recent events, that 'year' is still encoded, still reverberating secretly, constantly. (In this I'm also exploring ways of constructing longer, more open-ended poems - as a respite from the sonnets I've been trying to write...)
1969 DRAFT TWO (27.4.08)
From
some scenes directors cut their own dads.
This scene. Pan - pan - pan - pan!
Mum, twenty-one, runs out into snow
which
has shooshed the whole world immaculate
for forty days and nights.
Streetlamps' tangerine lozenges show
how
random & unplanned each snowflake seems
how falling's a gamble
a skittish joyride on the windflow.
Yet
zoom in! Closer! Her collar! Look!
One flake's frail cathedral,
light chiming through it, how that blind glow
from
her throat melts each of its tiny white
buttresses. Now zoom out!
This one! This is the one we follow.
It
floats up past the hem of her hounds'-tooth
coat, the hem of that down-
fall of a faun miniskirt, floats... Go
out
in that? Blast your eyes if you go out
in that! (Voiceover: Gran's
slammed black door of a Puritan no)
floats
toward the hem between the inside-
outside of her sobbing
hot, rebelling body. Cut to womb
where
this snowflake takes, doubles, triples, makes
icy facsimiles
of itself, starts elbowing for room.
A
snow-baby takes. Tiny thief in the
night of her desires.
Long-shot: Mum, who walks the long way home.
This is going to be a hugely challenging poem. I'm trying to get inside my own mother's head, thirty nine years ago. But it will be a fictionalisation, of course, and I'm pointing that up - and I suppose ironising that - by having myself as the 'director' of these scenes I can really have no knowledge of. "Some lads'd delete their own dads" I say at the start of the first draft. This becomes the violent-sounding "Some directors cut their own dads" in the second draft, above. I'm like the storyteller introducing himself before he begins his tale - and occasionally interrupting it. It's a common enough framing device. But I'm going to try to keep up the film references throughout to wrily emphasise how this 'autobiography' is just an edit, a Freudian fairytale rewrite. It's also a useful way of helping the readers to locate themselves - I'm assigning them the role of spectators. I want them to be immersed in the 'film' but to be occasionally reminded that they're sitting in a cinema. I want to make the point that this is not THE TRUTH, that although I'm writing autobiographically the very notion of autobiography is flawed. No matter what resource material I use, no matter how personal, I'll only ever be a teller of tales.
Teller of tales. Tale-teller. Snitch. Blabbermouth. Washer of dirty laundry in public... Maybe that last paragraph's just trying to justify the indiscretion, the insensitivity, of turning some aspects of my family's lives into art. But I have to. Obviously I don't want to hurt anybody in my family, but at the same time I have to be prepared to go where my art dictates.
That sounds portentous. And very pretentious. But you know what? I don't care! My poetry-writing is that important.
So I'm half with Plato when he puts poets with the angels and the prophets. But we are unclean too. We have blood on our hands. Semen, shit and earth. Nothing can be taboo for us.
Therefore we are dangerous to be around.
This afternoon I lay in The Arboretum, with Robin next to me, in the weak Spring sun - before this evening's thunderstorm. There were a few people out. A chavvy girl and her chavvy boyfriend passed us. She looked back at us, then again, then again, fascinated, slightly sniggering. Yes. Real, live homosexuals! Well done, I thought. A correct identification...
It was there, on the grass, that I wrote some more:
It's
better for you if it don't take, but
I want you wed, flit, out
of this village if the poor thing's born.
I
don't know how you dare I really don't.
The aisle's Victorian
terracotta tiles are coals which burn
the
soles of Mum's white shoes, each step she takes
towards... In church? In white?
the altar. She feels the snowman turn
and
turn in the smarting pear of her womb...
