sisyphus

For all those who, on receipt of yet another bloodless rejection email from a poetry mag, can manage little better in response than, “Kiss my arse, you bastards!”, here, with a little customisation applied, is the ultimate riposte.

Dear…

Thank you for your letter rejecting my application for employment with your firm.

I must inform you that I have received rejections from an unusually large number of exceptionally well-qualified organizations. With so varied and promising spectrum of rejections from which to select, it is impossible for me to consider them all.

After careful deliberation, then, and because a number of firms have found me more unsuitable, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your rejection. Despite your company’s outstanding qualifications and previous experience in rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not meet with my requirements at this time. As a result, I shall be starting employment with your firm on the first of the month.

Circumstances change and one can never know when new demands for rejection arise. Accordingly, I will keep your letter on file in case my requirements for rejection change. Please do not regard this letter as a criticism of your qualifications in attempting to refuse me employment. I wish you the best of luck in rejecting future candidates.

Yours sincerely…

And if dispatching your version of the above is not quite enough to put a skip in your step, here’s R.S. Thomas on the whole submission/rejection process:

If a poet realises that it has been his privilege to have a certain gift in the manipulation of language (language being the supreme human manifestation) then he is obviously committed from the very beginning to a lifetime of self-discipline, struggle, disappointment, failure, with just possibly the odd success which is greater in his eyes than it probably is in the eyes of anyone else.

Any who, like me, first encountered Chaucer as a member of that demonic team whose express creative purpose was to blight the lives of examinees between the ages of 16 & 18 (that bastard Shakespeare was another) will enjoy the extraction of piss going on here. And those who, like me, subsequently re-discovered Chaucer as one of the all-time big hitters will enjoy the accuracy both of style and content in Bill Bailey’s glorious parody.

Three fellowes wenten into a pubbe,
And gleefullye their handes did rubbe,
In expectatione of revelrie,
For ’twas the houre known as happye.
Greate botelles of wine did they quaffe,
And hadde a reallye good laffe
Til drunkennesse held full dominione,
For ’twas two for the price of one.
Yet after wine and meade and sac,
Man must have a massive snack,
Great pasties from Cornwalle!
Scottishe eggs round like a balle!
Great hammes, quaile, ducke and geese!
They suck’d the bones and drank the grease!
(One fellowe stood all pale and wan,
For he was vegetarianne)
Yet man knoweth that gluttonie,
Stoketh the fyre of lecherie,
Upon three young wenches round and slye,
The fellowes cast a wanton eye.
One did approach, with drunkene winke
“‘Ello darlin’, you fancy a drink?”,
Soon they caught them on their knee,
‘Twas like some grotesque puppettrie!
Such was the lewdness and debaucherie –
‘Twas like a sketch by Dick Emery!
(Except that Dick Emery is not yet borne –
So such comparisonne may not be drawn).
But then the fellowes began to pale,
For quail are not the friende of ale!
And in their bellyes much confusione!
From their throats vile extrusione!
Stinking foule corruptionne!
Came spewinge forth from droolinge lippes,
The fetide stenche did fille the pubbe,
‘Twas the very arse of Beelzebubbe!
Thrown they were, from the Horne And Trumpette,
In the street, no coyne, no strumpet.
Homeward bounde, must quicklie go,
To that ende – a donkey stole!
Their handes all with vomit greased,
(The donkey was not pleased,
And threw them into a ditche of shite!)
They all agreed: “What a brilliant night!”

Joan was a part of my life from my birth. Both my parents came from small families and from the earliest days of their marriage they collected around them various ‘waifs-and-strays’ who, long after their liberation back into the world, remained an integral part of the extended clan.

Joan Beagle, coming from a very unsettled family background, was one such and when she married during the war, husband Stan Slater was immediately incorporated into the collective. When Stan died suddenly in 1969, Joan moved down from his home town of Ormskirk in Lancashire to Surbiton in Surrey, just a mile or two from my family home in Kingston-upon-Thames. She survived both my parents by four years, remaining fiercely independent for as long as she could. After a year in a care home she died in 2012, aged 92. During that year I had power of attorney on her behalf and I saw to the sale of her flat, the arrangement of her funeral and the disposition of her estate.

There remained only the matter of the final resting place for her ashes and locating it was for a long time an intractable problem. The crucial papers were missing so while we scoured the internet for a record of where Stan’s ashes had been scattered and where some memorial was sited, Joan lived in a smart casket on top of a wardrobe in the big shed that houses most of my books at the end of the garden. But the omniscience of the internet let us down and in consultation with Stan’s niece Ann and her husband Trevor it was decided that Joan’s ashes should be interred in the Slater family grave in Ormskirk.

I’m unable to attend the brief ceremony that will see her finally settled and an hour or so ago I watched the van taking the ashes up to Ormskirk drive away. Although Joan died in 2012 and my parents some time before that, I felt a powerful sense of all that has been and is gone – of blue remembered hills shared with that sometimes ramshackle extended family from my earliest childhood memories into my late middle age.

Shortly after Joan’s death I wrote this poem.

STOPPING

Joan Slater 1920 – 2012

She has stopped. This is what happens.
Trailing a life as big as the sea, you can
just stop and make it seem as if the silence
that remains was always what was there.

We who are left tumble through it and
the air rushes upwards as if to lift us
briskly back to where we were. But
we hurry down towards ground zero,

we travellers wrapped in time and physics.
And to fall is, in a sense, to fly. So face
to face, on point like dancers in a chorus
line, we totter down the stairway of the sky.

SMOKE, SMOKE THAT CIGARETTE by ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL

A while back, The Independent reported Oxford professor of medical statistics and epidemiology Sir Richard Peto as stating at a cancer conference in Birmingham that one billion people will die from smoking-related diseases this century unless drastic steps are taken. The highest death toll will be in the developing countries.

When I was at college I took great pride in my smoking. Not for me the bog standard student’s fag du jour, a Player’s Number 6. I favoured in any given week Sullivan Powell full strength, Balkan Sobranie, yellow packet Gauloises, untipped classics Player’s Gold Flake, rollies formed out of Auld Kendal in liquorice paper, and, until the 1967 Arab/Israeli War, a very classy flat Egyptian cigarette under the imprimatur of Simon Artz. And when I finally ran out obscure cigarette brands I smoked a pipe, flourishing for a while a beautifully carved Meerschaum that I’d bought in Cyprus, stuffed with the lung-scouring Coniston Black Plug.

In later years I smoked cigars – mainly Villigers, but, when I could get them, Swisher’s Sweets or Fleur de Savanne. From time to time, when flush or simply reckless, I’d lay in a small stock of Hoyo De Monterrey double coronas, which could be purchased loose from that most fragrant of tobacconists, Smith and Son in the Charing Cross Road.

And then a surgeon, investigating a night-time breathing problem, found a small papaloma inside my throat. He recommended that I have it removed at the earliest opportunity. For two months I was convinced that I had cancer and by the time an ENT specialist removed it, analysed it as benign and pronounced it to have absolutely nothing to do with years of exotic pulmonary abuse, I had given up smoking completely.

Now the practice seems alien and perverse to me. I don’t feel any of that priggish righteousness that so infects the professional non-smoker. And although I find the smell of standard brand cigarettes abhorrent, I don’t cross busy streets to strike them from the mouths of those still afflicted. But the notion of setting fire to a small cylinder of dead leaves and then inhaling the smoke produced strikes me as every bit as crazy and inexplicable as it did to Bob Newhart’s Elizabethan taking the ‘phone call from Sir Walter Raleigh in the Americas.

God knows, life is perilous enough from the moment one steps from one’s front door. I’ll take my chances from day to day and happily except myself from that doomed one billion

BOB NEWHART ON THE ‘PHONE TO SIR WALTER RALEIGH

Tobacco, divine, rare, super excellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosophers’ stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases…but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, ’tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health; hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul.
Robert Burton, (1577-1640), English clergyman author of ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’.

Tobacco drieth the brain, dimmeth the sight, vitiateth the smell, hurteth the stomach, destroyeth the concoction, disturbeth the humors and spirits, corrupteth the breath, induceth a trembling of the limbs, exsiccateth the windpipe, lungs, and liver, annoyeth the milt, scorcheth the heart, and causeth the blood to be adjusted.
Tobias Venner, (1577-1660)’ Via Recta ad Vitam Longam’

I have seen many a man turn his gold into smoke, but you are the first who has turned smoke into gold.
Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), speaking to Sir Walter Raleigh who brought the tobacco plant to England from America

I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.
Mark Twain (1835-1910

Yeah, babe, you just watch. When I die they’ll all blame the fried egg sandwiches and the fags … and it’ll have been all the fucking wholemeal toast and fresh vegetables’
Kathy Burke, English actress

Remember, if you smoke after sex you’re doing it too fast.
Woody Allen

1. My earliest memory comes from around the age of 18 months. I was standing up inside my cot and my father came into the room with a ginger biscuit for me. As he approached the cot he tripped and dropped the biscuit into my full potty. I was inconsolable.

2. I am sometimes incapable of logic, patience or calm when dealing with challenging day-to-day operations within the material world. I am firmly convinced that all inanimate objects, regardless of nature or scale, are in a state of undeclared war against humankind. I share with Basil Fawlty a policy that, if a delinquent object – a chair, a vacuum cleaner, a drawer, a motor vehicle – fails to respond to reasoned argument, it must be chastised, even unto destruction.

3. When I dream, almost invariably it’s of corridors, stairwells, crowded rooms, many storeys, fast-moving groups of people. I seldom remember more than fragments of my dreams, but their unsettling influence sometimes extends well into waking hours.

4. I believe that three of the most important inventions of the 20th century are the 0.5-sized V5 fibre-tipped pen, Doctor Marten boots and the Dyson vacuum cleaner.

5. I am a radio ham. My calllsign is G0 EUV. A few years back, when I was active, I could send and receive morse code at a rate of about 12 words a minute.

6. In 1989, during a trip to the Urals city of Ekaterinburg (then still Sverdlovsk), as a licensed radio ham, I operated the university amateur station, putting out calls under its Soviet callsign. I was the first non-Soviet amateur radio operator to man the station and I received many glowing comments from UK and North American hams on the excellence of my English.

7. In 1985 I compiled a dictionary of Anglo-Romani, the patois of the English Gypsies. It remains in a set of notebooks, superseded by a number of superior (if less quirky) published versions by other compilers.

8. At the age of 8 I was a school refuser. 10 years later I applied to teacher training college and subsequently qualified as a teacher.

9. In the early ‘70s I auditioned Elvis Costello as keyboard player for my band of the time and chose someone else.

10. I have never drunk a cup of tea or coffee.

11. Four things (amongst many) that will bring tears are: watching ‘Brief Encounter’ yet again, Vaughan-Williams’ 3rd Symphony, the ‘Pastoral’, the closing scene of ‘King Lear’ and Roy Orbison singing ‘Love Hurts’.

12. I am pretty much innumerate, able to manage only basic addition, subtraction and multiplication.

13. I may yet hear the call, I guess, but here and now, at this moment in time, it’s my quiet conviction that there is no God.

14. When I was a teacher at the King Alfred School in North-West London, Stanley Kubrick’s daughter Vivien gave my wife and I a kitten born on the set of ‘A Clockwork Orange’. When subsequently it became sick with meningitis, SK sent me a letter offering the services of his vet. So concerned was he as to the fate of the unfortunate cat, he provided me with his personal ‘phone number so that I could ring him ‘at any time of day or night’.

15. Had I been born a girl I would have been named Charlotte Mary Ann. I was injudicious enough to reveal this at primary school. (Which might go some way towards explaining the school phobia!)

16. I don’t follow any particular philosophy, teaching or creed, nor do I have any theories or convictions proposing some pre-ordained meaning to life. I believe that the best of us is in our capacity to give and receive unconditional love and that the struggle to prioritise that above all other callings provides purpose enough.

17. I taught Heather McCartney when she was about 11 years old. On one occasion when I was overloaded with books and files, she kindly carried my bass guitar – an original Hofner ‘Violin’ model, the famous Paul McCartney bass – from our classroom, where I had been storing it prior to a gig directly after school, to my car. A sense of the resonance of this has grown over the years.

18. A band of which I was a member once played to a capacity audience in the Royal Albert Hall.

19. Were money no object, I would have two suits made for me by Ede and Ravenscroft of Cambridge. One would be a black three-piece in corduroy; the other would be a Harris tweed three-piece in lovat green. Also from Ede and Ravenscroft I would have a pair of black suede chukka boots and three pairs of silk socks in red, green and black.

20. I have no earlobes. Interpretations by others of this phenomenon vary between their being accepted as a sign of congenital genius and an indication of inbuilt diabolical tendencies.

21. One of my odder possessions is the business end of an enormous Roman clay dildo, discovered in the shallows off the beach at Salamis in Cyprus.

22. Whenever I see a single magpie, I inscribe a cross in the air and say, “Good morning, Mr Magpie, how’s your wife?” I see this as insurance in a world in which nothing, nothing is absoutely certain.

23. In the early ‘70s, with other chemically enhanced members of the band I was in, I visited the derelict and deserted Nunhead Cemetery in the middle of an acid trip. Whilst all around me my companions were noisily unravelling, I experienced an all-pervading sense of calm and serenity such as I’d never experienced before, nor indeed since.

24. As a novice skier of one week’s experience in Les Arcs, in Savoie, France, I found myself briefly at the top of a vertiginous slope. Briefly because within the two heartbeats it took to register the steepness of the slope and the length of the descent, momentum took me onto it and moving forward at gathering speed. Very shortly into the massive downhill acceleration, I realised that I was probably going to die. All fear left me at that point and I tucked the skis under my arms, sunk into a crouch and headed ecstatically towards oblivion. Eventually the corresponding slope on the other side of the valley into which I plunged slowed me to a halt. In a lifetime of general indolence, it was probably my most exhilarating three minutes.

25. Until my early 60s it was my intention to cheat disease, accident and natural decay and live well into my 90s. In 2005 I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. My operation and subsequent radiotherapy were successful, but ever since then I have been conscious of the possibility of its return. My perspectives on human fragility and mortality have changed profoundly. There is an upside to this and a downside.

When I was 16 and the proud possessor of a vast black turtleneck jumper, a pair of 15”-bottom black jeans and army boots with blood-red laces, I went to a jazz-and-poetry concert in Leeds. I can’t remember now how we swung it. Our boarding school, 13 miles from the city streets, set amongst the wind-swept fields around Wetherby, was of liberal persuasion. But the Head, a muscular Quaker committed to bracing rambles across the moors, preferably in driving horizontal rain, believed jazz to be decadent and sybaritic. He would have never had granted us late night leave for anything less uplifting than an organ recital or an evening of Beethoven’s later string quartets. So presumably our lie was rock solid and backed up by the cultural events columns of the Yorkshire Post.

The venue was the Esquire Club, a strip joint by day and a gorgeously seedy jazz club after 7.30. We sat at a small round table and lit our licorice paper ciggies from the burning candle stuck in a wax-embellished Chianti bottle. Decadent sybarites, we had arrived and for an ecstatic two-and-a-half hours we were as cool as a polar bear’s pyjamas (as one of us – Andy B, I think – put it).

In actual fact, as became apparent to me much later on, we were lucky enough to catch four of the seminal figures in what passed for the British poetic and musical avant garde of the time. The two poets were Mike Horovitz and Pete Brown and the musicians were the composer Cornelius Cardew and the sax-player Dick Heckstall-Smith. I was entranced from the start. Already in thrall to bebop and the then emergent cool school sounds and passionately in love with the Beats, this was the perfect synthesis. And I can identify that glorious evening’s offerings as the inspiration point from which sprung the notebooks, folders and ring-binders of derivative and uncomprehending drivel that comprised my early oeuvre.

A vital component of the Beat ephemera that I gathered around me at that time was a six-track extended play record, a poetry-and-jazz E.P. called Red Bird. It featured the poet Christopher Logue reading loose translations of Pablo Neruda’s 15 Love Poems to a jazz backing by the Tony Kinsey Quartet. The auspicious combination of Logue’s sinewy tenor voice, the surreal romanticism of the verse and the lithe, lyrical jazz settings (which featured some of Britain’s top jazz players) seduced me instantly. I played it to vinyl extinction, each session transporting me away from the bucolic surroundings of my West Riding boarding school to les bas fonds of the Soho that I explored (by safe daylight) every holiday.

Sadly, the all-but-unplayable original disc vanished during my student years and I spent the next three decades trying to find a replacement copy. Eventually, eBay coughed it up and I dodged the heavy bidders and secured it with a massive ‘Buy Now’ excess.

Here it is, for better or worse, complete with nostalgic surface noise. I can’t judge it: it’s one of my embedded cultural milestones and within a bar and a stanza I’m back in my Yorkshire dormitory, gazing out of the sash window onto a Soho street scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFPE1n4aiKs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Horovitz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Brown

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Heckstall-Smith

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Cardew

…as my Granny used to say. We’re back from Trefin and the very beautiful Pembrokeshire coastline. Sisyphus will now continue to ascend…

Away for a couple of weeks. A dodgy West Wales connection so comment responses and new posts on my return.