Behind the Words: Lament
As I promised in the Behind the Words: A Trolley Full of Marx post, here’s a piece from a different century. In 1999, while I was in my second year at the University of Aberdeen, I self-published a pamphlet of poems called Fences We Build. It was mainly poems I had written while a member of the Creative Writing Society and a few from my high school days. A couple had been published elsewhere, but mostly not. I printed about fifty, sold them for a couple of quid and handed them out to a few notables when they came to Aberdeen for guest lectures or for Alan Spence’s Word Festival. I hope each and every one of them immediately binned it.
No one likes looking back at their earlier writing. Writing is a craft, something that you get better at with practice, so it is only to be expected that your first efforts are objectively worse than your latest. There’s a subjective cringe there too, as you are reintroduced to the person you long ago ceased to be. Flicking through Fences We Build today is not a pleasant experience. I wrote about why in “Tombo-en”, an essay in the latest issue of Gutter (25).
“Lament” was in many ways the centre piece of the pamphlet. It was something of a breakthrough poem for me at the time, a moment where a lot of the things I was trying to do all came together. I thought it was the beginning of something but actually it was the end of the first stage of my writing evolution. Apart from a couple of outliers, I never wrote a multi-stanza poem again after “Lament”, preferring the minimalism of haiku, senryu and fractured poetry that would eventually become my first proper poetry book.
I’ve tweaked it - I couldn’t help myself - before putting it up here. There were lines that sounded good but I honestly couldn’t have explained what I was trying to say. I was working to a rigid meter back then, something I care much less about today, so I took the handcuffs off and let the poem stretch. It’s effectively the same though, more a remastering than a rewrite.
It was originally published with an epigram - looking at Fences We Build I see I really loved an epigram back then - which was “Even amidst fierce flames, the golden lotus can be planted.” The sharp-eyed among you will recognise this as the quote from Sylvia Plath’s gravestone.
As I explain in “Tombo-en”, I went through a heavy and deep Sylvia Plath phase while a teenager, and it culminated in a visit to her grave in Heptonstall with Patrick, a colleague from the CWS and a friend I don’t see nearly enough these days. Patrick is from Yorkshire and one holiday we drove down, had a few legendary nights out, his sister dyed my hair bright red, and we went to Heptonstall and Hebden Bridge, where I bought Ted Hughes’s book Elmet, his poems about the area accompanied by Fay Godwin’s photography. I still have it, it’s a thing of beauty.
I wrote “Lament” after my pilgrimage, and it is, in its own way, a loving pastiche of a Plath poem with obvious references to her work (yew trees, moons, daffodils) but there’s also a touch of Hughes in there as well, as is inevitable when writing about that landscape. It’s Simon Armitage country too, but I can’t look at a Yorkshire moor without hearing Hughes’s voice.
As I say, it proved to be the end of an era. I stopped writing poetry like this and very soon after began writing prose. I had been in love with imagery, but narrative became my obsession. I moved on from Plath too, rereading her occasionally, but the memories her poems conjure are often unwelcome. Anyway her voice is so far inside me that I don’t need the words on the page. The books we read at that age leave their mark deep and heavy.
I doubt I’ll revisit any more poems from Fences We Build. I’m glad I did that pamphlet, it served its purpose at the time, but the work is unrepresentative, juvenile and often quite, quite shit. Not even one for the hipsters.