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| One thing not de-selected is this image for the cover, Patricia's 1993 portrait of me. |
Some I particularly regretted: it was either ‘Mesopotamia ’ or ‘Schrage Musik’ from The Flashlight Sonata (and later Complete Twentieth Century Blues). ‘Mesopotamia ’
won. The 12 line ‘Standing By (for my father)’, from The
Drop (soon to be published by Oystercatcher’) stood in for the earlier
poem, both of them dedicated to my father.
‘The Micropathology of the Sign’, one of my birthday
‘homages’ to Bob Cobbing was replaced by a shorter ‘homage’, one that missed
out appearing in ‘Twentieth Century Blues’ due to its time-based parameters, but which I like. Oddly, ‘The
Micropathology…’ has received a lot of hits on Pages. Perhaps the mockingly-academic title attracts latter-day
structuralists. (They are probably disappointed by the poem, but maybe not. It
does attempt to offer what it says on the tin, though with relation to Bob’s
work, particularly Processual, to
which it originally provided an introduction.)
Similarly, of another poem rescued from a 1987 Ship of Fools
pamphlet collaboration with Patricia Farrell, Looking North, it had to be either the first or second poem. I went
with the second, which I thought a gnat’s wing’s breadth ‘better’ than the
first. But I can still let others judge.
‘Hymns to the God my Typewriter Believes In’ is one of my
‘text and commentary’ poems. There were quite a few already in the Selected. (I
have a sense that Hymns to the God in
Which My Typewriter Believes didn’t get around a lot, even with its Alan
Halsey cover.) This one, long, even in its selected version, seemed incomplete
and weakened by excerption, so it was a no-brainer. Similarly, ‘The Sacred
Tanks of Dagenham’ was a follow-up to ‘The Materialisation of Soap 1947’, which
as a coda to, and partial substitute for, ‘Schrage Musik’, was necessary.
‘Dagenham’ is sprawling and funny and I like reading it, but it was marked by
its affiliation to the ‘1947’ poem, and by
the fact that I decided not to select too much from texts in the Salt Tin Pan Arcadia and Complete Twentieth Century Blues (though when I selected I didn’t
know Salt was about to savage its list, though Twentieth Century is still available from them in paperback).
‘History or Sleep’ is a long poem I enjoyed writing after
the grimness of The Lores, and I
wanted to call the selected poems by this title, and I was determined to include the
whole of it. Another simple reason for the squeeze. (It also put a squeeze on The Lores itself and ‘Book Two’ had to
go!) The de-selected poems are near misses for all sorts of reasons, some of
which I suspect I’ve forgotten.
So: the book itself is available here soon. I will write
another post when it is out, to talk about the selection rather than the
de-selection process.
The de-selected poems, a kind of annex or sampler for History or Sleep, may be read here. They
are (in order of composition):
‘Tombland’ (from 1979). Here. (But note it has been
‘remoded’ for a new work as a 'Miltonic', post-Selected Poems, ironically, and you can read that as well.)
‘The Blickling Hall Poem’, 1980. Here.
‘Looking North 1’. Here.
‘The Micropatholgy of the Sign’. Here.
from ‘The Lores: Book Two’. Here.
‘The Sacred Tanks of Dagenham’. Here.
‘A Voice Within’ from The
Anti-Orpheus. Here.
Part One of ‘Putting Claws on the Glove’, a homage to the
great Catalan poet Joan Brossa. Here.
from ‘Hymns to the God my Typewriter Believes In’. Here.
form Warrant Error, 'Byron James is Okay'. Here.
If you want to now read how I did select them, read this post here!
