The Curse of the Long Poem

Snowdrop is a long poem. I reckon I'm about halfway through the poem, maybe edging towards 2/3s done. So in a classic displacement activity (to avoid writing more of the poem) I've been looking at the poem itself. Here are its vital stats:

Started: Dec 2003 - the original Idea was to produce a Crimbo poem of between 150-200 lines about a girl who goes into the woods to find a Crimbo tree and ends up dancing with the spirits of the wood - Puck, the Jenny, cold Jack, Jack the Flame, etc.

Expected completion date: not a clue.

Total number of lines written to date: 1,870, which includes ...
- a rondeau
- 3 triolets
- 3 30 line ballads
- 28 lines of Latin shamelessly lifted from De Rerum Natura
- 23 sonnets, including 14 sonnets woven into a crown
- 705 lines of Alliterative Verse (the Beowulf verse, though I write more in the style of the Gawain Poet - in other words I cheat a bit)

Um, that's quite a bit of poetry, when you think about it.

What with my decision to concentrate purely on the Snowdrop poem during this NaPo adventure, I thought it would be a good idea to read what I've already written - hence the two rewrites of vile portions of the poem posted for 1 and 2 April. The most striking thing about the poem (to me, anyway, at the moment) is just how bloody religious the work is turning out to be.

I mean, how the fuck did that happen?

I've not got a religious bone in my body - thrown out of Sunday School when I was 5 years old - and yet the work that has consumed more of my poetry-writing time over the past 4 years turns out to be a bloody debate about the existence of God.

What the poem needs is a bit more action. I'll see what I can do ...

NaPo 08: 2 April

Snowdrop 2.5: Lost

"I've lost my walls! The room has gone along
with heat and ceilings, leaves and mud where once
I had a floor - I've lost the walls! She danced
with flames - the girl with bark for bones - that's wrong:
I'm seeing things awry; I'm dosed on pills
like sweets at Christmas. Close my eyes and stretch
my arms out wide and wait until I touch
the walls with fingertips - oh shit, I'm ill!
My walls have gone: these trees - exist? But how
can this be happening? The air's so cold,
the earth - it's hard like concrete frost, the mist
- it glows? Look up! The moon's still there, still proud
and full. So where's the house? No roof to hold
the night away; my wall's are gone: I'm lost!"

NaPo 08: 1 April

Yes, folks. It's that time of the year again ...

Snowdrop 1.4: The dam in her nest, at bay

She snouts the tin aside - it tumbles
its clanking course across the slopes
that mould her home, her mazy nest,
knocking the rime of newborn ice
from leaf and peel; she pulls a lace
of paper free from its frosted pile,
drags it back to her den within
the layers of waste.
          She watches: younger,
this one, the white of wisdom yet
to tip her pelt. She taps the heaps
with barreled whiskers, braces her feet
on discards and leavings, levers her hips
forward towards the warmth of rot.
She's coming home.
          She hears the crack
of slipping bone above - a cat
perhaps, or stoat come hunting pups.
She snicks her teeth and snags a taste
of mystery - not dog, nor magpie beak.
Her press of belly bullies her on:
pluck out the fur, plaster her hall
with hairs and strips of wholesome compost
before she bursts.
          She finds the bore
that leads her back to blood and milk
each pawstep measured, masked in stealth -
a hunting child, a haunting thief
come looking for siblings soon to be born,
a season's feast.
          She smells her now,
a daughter, once, a demon now
as dead as the mists that mould her form:
she lifts her lip, levels her ears
to her skull and sets the spars of her claws
deep in the walls of her den, and waits.

The only thing to do ...

... after videotaping your neighbour's funeral on the specific request of the grieving widow, and then editing it all down onto a DVD for her, all in the course of 6 hours, is to listen to a bit of Matt Bianco:



And no, I'm not going to upload the funeral tape onto YouTube. That's just too wierd - even for me!

Rik's phrase of the day

"The End"

Yep, those are my favourite words right at this moment, because those are the words I found myself writing at just gone 3:00am this morning on page god-knows-how-many of the first draft of my very first science fiction novel.

And as a bonus, I also dreamed a title for the book this morning (later on; I was in bed by this time) ... The Gods in the Jungle. Snazzy, huh? The title only brings up two Google hits, so it should be safe enough to claim as my own.

Some statistics:
First word written: 1 November 2005 (All Souls' day)
Last words written: 23 March 2008 (Easter Sunday)
No of words inbetween: just over 127 thousand
No of chapters: 36 plus a short epilogue
No of sex scenes: um, two? Plus allusions to quite a few other encounters
No of point-of-view: characters: seven
No of other characters: there's a whole circus of them
No of alien monsters: the Barby Rats are cute - not monsters at all.
Happily-ever-after score: well, there's certainly a resolution for the 2 young lovers and the evil uncle ...

Anyways, there's lots to do still. Revision, for instance - though that shouldn't take too long as I've been revising for consistency and style as I go along. Then it's all the fun of submitting the tome to agents (and publishers) and waiting for them to recognise my 'genious', etc, etc, and so forth.

PS: Should I be worried about the jolly zombies in the dream that gave me my title? The royal blue rooms with bright yellow windows floating through the sky were also rather trippy. Even cutting off a zombie's face didn't kill it - luckily they were fine about the knifework, said it happened all the time and I didn't need to worry.

PPS: there's no zombies in my novel, just in case people were worrying ...

Meet Aspasa

... my Dæmon, apparently:



The books were good, the film not so good. The dæmon might just make up for the film - if she behaves herself, of course.

And the new name for Rik's poetry website is ...

The RikVerse website

Snazzy, huh?!? It ties in with the poetry book thingy - marketing and stuff.

Anyways, I've redesigned the poetry website. In the end I decided that simple was best, so wordage has been cut down as far as possible. I also radically redesigned the navigation and made access to the poetry - which is what the website is supposed to be about, yes? - more immediate.

The look'n'feel is distinctly minimalistic and uncluttered with a nice, large, open and well-spaced fontsize to make people feel right at home, and the poems easier to read. Images have gone - there's only three static images on the whole site. Who needs images anyway?

Even so, this isn't a simplistic recoding: there's plenty of little bits'n'pieces of backroom stuff to make it feel a little more, well, sophisticated; for instance video and audio feeds are now embedded into the page but only appear when the visitor requests them - check out the Judgement poem for an example of both, and while you're there have a play with the navigation pane.

Most importantly, of course: Enjoy!

Redesigning my poetry website

Well, actually, I'm very happy with most of the Rik's Poetry Pages website, but there's two things that I think could do with a bit of a spring clean:

1 ~ the home page: what would you both like to see changed here? Less words? More words? Different words? Random poem of the day? Links in sidebar rather than at bottom? More kittens? Better eye candy?

2 ~ the name of the site. Rik's Poetry Pages - well, it's not very inspiring, is it? What do you both think I should call the site?

C'mon folks: talk to me here! I want your input on these key issues!

Most popular poems - Feb 08

The most popular poems on Rik's Poetry Pages for February 2008 were:

#1 - Snowdrop Part 7: Stutfall
#2 - Summersex
#3 - Fool
#4 - Traveller
#5 - A Walk in the Park

Online is the future of poetry?

This excerpt from Ron Silliman's blog post today caught my eye:

[...] We are moving, faster than I think any of us (or me anyway) are conscious of, toward a day on which poetry is something that exists primarily on the web, having made the migration away from print & bookstores to a degree that right now seems unfathomable. Those older poets who currently refuse to publish on the web – they do exist – will discover soon enough that they have painted themselves into the proverbial corner. Far from being a "debased" terrain where works commingle without being presorted by "value," the web simply is becoming the commons for such work. [...]

As you can imagine, I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. Unfortunately, the vast majority of poets I come into contact with (online, strangely enough, as I hardly ever venture out into the real world wearing my floppy lilac poet's cap) seem unable to see the future of poetry as I see it. They're all still tied into the tried-and-tested 20th century equation of poet = platform where platform is a wierd agglomeration of how many books you've convinced others to publish for you, how many of the right sort of magazines you've appeared in, how many other poets you're on first name terms with, how many poetry residencies you've undertaken, how many smaller magazines solicit your work, how many reviews and blurbs of other poets' work you get to write and - this one's quite important, I think - how good your poems are.

It's not much fun being a shill for internet poetry when everyone points and laughs at your efforts. Sometimes I wonder whether I'd be better off exchanging my double-extra-thick-rhino-quality skin for that rather attractive rivet-reinforced tinfoil sombrero to go over my floppy lilac poet's cap ...