This week: What I learned from the back cover of an old LP, why jazz drummers are heavenly messengers and why the minor key is essential to poetry…
If you ever have the misfortune of being introduced as a poet in polite company the first question you will be asked is, “Are you published?” They don’t mean, “Have you made your poetry public?” (yes, we make poetry, we don’t simply write it) What they are actually asking is, “Are you (or your poems) worthy enough to be in a book?” Even in the digital age the book is the great leveller. You are not a serious poet without one. The unpublished poet is treated with the same kind of suspicion we reserve for the person who is talking to themselves at the back of the bus - the unpublished poet suffers as much as the person talking to themselves at the back of the bus.
Ten years ago I read my long, narrative poem My Name is Swan at a literary festival. It was a curated evening around the theme of ‘The City’. I appeared halfway up (or halfway down) the programme along with a number of well established and highly regarded authors whose work I greatly admired. I was pretty chuffed to have such a billing as a relatively obscure artist among such prestigious writers. I was, in the contemporary vernacular, ‘a minor poet’. I don’t mind being a minor poet, I prefer to sing in minor keys not in a major ones. Most good art is made in minor keys. Hits are written in major keys because they emotionally resonate more immediately. The songs that stay with us though contain shadows, minor chords, modal turns, notes of regret. What makes a song endure is not happiness but happiness corrupted by the knowledge of loss.
None of the other authors came to my reading. They were not disinterested or deliberately shunning me, much as the voices in my head would like to tell me. No, they were simply elsewhere, doing what authors are supposed to do, trying to earn a living from their work. They were meeting their public, standing behind their merchandise stalls, selling their books. I didn’t have a book. I didn’t have anything to sell. I had a poem. And while I read it, it was alive and after I’d finished it went to the place that poems go, where the wind lives, where midnight sighs arrive, where love hides.
The modern book, as we know it, printed with bound pages, has only been with us for around five hundred years. Writing itself emerged around five thousand years ago but the origins of poetry are ancient, perhaps stretching back into pre-history. 50,000 years ago humans were almost certainly using rhythm and repetition, chanting and song and formulaic language came into existence long before any of it was written down. The availability of cheaper paper made from wood pulp and the advent of industrial printing, meant that by the 1800s the book had become a mass-market object. With the arrival of the 20th century paperback, books were ubiquitous. The international best seller was upon us.
The introduction of the book meant we no longer needed to listen to our tribal elders, to hear their stories. We lost, perhaps a little of the ability to even listen to each other. Everything was written down for us, to be studied or stacked on high shelves, hidden away in academy libraries. Books became power. A new kind of truth had arrived. One that was absolute because, as you know, if it’s in a book then, well, it must be true.
I left the authors with their stalls, with their sales, with their transactions and I took my poem home wondering where I might go with it next. A book didn’t feel like the right fit for My Name is Swan somehow. It was a poem that needed to feel the wind in its feathers, have air under its wings, it needed an adventure. It needed to live. Back then I believed books were where poems went to die. Don’t get me wrong. I love books. If you’ve written one I might even have it on my shelves. If I haven’t then send me copy because honestly I do really love books. I just felt that this poem, and the other long form works that I’d made, had a life beyond the page.
I don’t come from a literary background, I come from an artistic one, from a musical one but I’m in good company among poets in this respect. Yeats went to art school and hey, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I owe much in my approach to making to Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat, in composition to Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, in rhythm to Max Roach and Elvin Jones. Poems are as much about tone and colour and pace and inflection as they are about meaning. Listen to Duke Ellington’s Money Jungle, experience Charlie Mingus duelling on bass with drummer Max Roach and it is poetry. Listen to the hustle and shuffle of Elvin Jones on Coltrane’s Love Supreme and you may believe you are in the presence of angels. Poets should aspire to be up there among them, not just Dear Sir / Madam-ing their manuscripts to publishers thinking that this is the only way to see their poems in flight.
The original back cover artwork of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has the complete lyrics printed on it. It was the first major rock album to do so. Music publishers had previously opposed printing lyrics on sleeves but only because they feared it would hurt the sales of sheet music and, in some respects, printed poems are only the sheet music, a flat representation of the poetry. The track She’s Leaving Home on Sgt. Pepper contains the line “We gave her everything money could buy.” It is followed by the refrain, “bye, bye.” Sung, it has a haunting beauty, written down it becomes a dull pun. Something is lost.
It is generally agreed that The Odyssey was performed in the field for three to four hundred years before ever being written down. You can now experience Homer’s poem on the big screen. My Name Is Swan became a film before it ever became a book. The journey Homer describes took ten years and ten years ago I took my poem on an odyssey of its own. For a decade I wasn’t simply the architect of my poetry, I became its architecture.
Next week: As My Name Is Swan comes into print, I’ll tell of the adventures it went on before settling on the page and share why I decided to publish it in a book.