Some time ago I declared myself a poet. You may have been wondering how the words are lining up. Well, not very well. Like a heavy cloud mid-way across the sky on a windless day; like a 1985 Soviet-made Lada, bought from a dodgy dealer, on its way up; like a ball that was rolling downhill really fast but then reached a flat stretch and - the flat stretch being pretty long – began losing its momentum, ran into a few small stones, which were not big enough to stop it, but fatally slowed the ball until it lost the momentum completely*, I have stalled, mid-verse.
However, once a poet, always a poet, as an old adage goes, or at least should go. So the other day a line got out of me. I stopped and waited for a few more, so that I could package them nicely and sell as a cheap poem-let, but more never arrived and I got stranded with just one - pretty dramatic, but still single – sentence, which however hard I might try I would have difficulty selling, even to my staunches fans, as a poem, or even half-limerick.
Whatever you think of me as a poet, you can’t say I’m one of those lazy gits who are shameless enough to bundle a few random lines and call them a poem. I’m too word-proud to stoop to passing off incoherent prose as poetry. I may not practice it myself, but I preach slog.
I have decided then to try a less usual approach to get my poetic juices flowing. Let’s call it word charming. Just like in worm charming you do various strange things to the ground in which what you’re after lives, I’ll be doing various strange things to the mind – or the mind-cloud – in which what I’m after …. whatever words** do before they get out . The first trick will be to beat on the stubborn ground of my imagination with an imaginary review of a poem I should have written driven, or pulled, by that one line that came to me one night when, on a cold and empty night, I was walking down a narrow street in what seemed then a narrow town somewhere north of a wine label.
"The excruciating wait has been rewarded. The hype - done justice to. The whole print – nicked. The collateral merchandise - really cute (a bit expensive, though).
Fifty three years after his first volume (just two poems and one limerick, but as good as twice as many) caused lasting ripples in the literary world, the poet currently known as A has published, as an investigative team of the Washington Post sensationally established last week, another volume. The three and a half - but what a half! – poems were sprayed on the pavements of the world’s major cities last October, triggering a series of wild speculations as to their authorship (for obvious reasons Homer and Keats were ruled out early on). The verses, as we all remember, were accompanied by Banksy’s*** drawings. The pavements were demolished soon afterwards and the slabs with the writing on them – stolen, no doubt for the poetry rather than Banksy’s quite two-dimensional works.
While the critical spotlight has been understandably directed at the opening piece with its 577 verses, 45 stanzas and its Greek-tragedy type choruses, the volume’s gem is undeniably its enigmatic two page-long closing chord.
In the most original opening I have read in two weeks, five metaphysical themes are raised high up, like grand standards before a mediaeval battle, and flutter over our heads, or lives, for a brief moment, before we are taken, in a dramatic swoop, to a musty basement crammed with paintings by old masters. Then a series of half-identified people, objects and animals float past us in what feels like a hot and unfocused Central European summer.
Suddenly and without any thought-out justification John Maynard Keynes turns up, “dead in both runs”, and scares the shit out of us, as he bloody well should. At this point the poem, inflated with meaningless words just like the economy can be inflated with meaningless money, seems to be on the verge of a destructive explosion that will lay bare its emptiness. The sentences hurt physically.
Out of this chaos, three sublime lines conjure up a woman’s face. She leads us into a snow-covered, Christmas-lit calm, and there we wake up lying motionless on the cobble stones of a small alley, surrounded by a pack of wolfish looking hooded beasts. Before we can decide whether they are there to comfort, destroy or both, a rather attractive silhouette gets thrillingly close, obstructing “the silver watermelon”**** . Then someone whispers a line that’s here to stay, one of those controversial – and cheesy some might say (and have said) - hallmark lines that simply have to, regardless of what the Washington Post guys tell us, come from a poem by A:
Lord of the Moon, burst me.
*the Homeric thing; in case you wonder.
**or thoughts; what a mysterious relation…
***Banksy still denies offering a six figure sum for the privilege of having his name associated with A; it was allegedly a five-figure sum.
****presumably the Moon
