The "spark" in Rik's Sparky Little Substack Space
The most fundamental truth about poetry is that every poem that has ever been written is, at its root, A Lie.
Here, let me demonstrate:
Dad, Something's Wrong with Nanna "Son, you know it takes some time to see the truth from fiction: Tom don't die for real and Jerry's just a cartoon mouse. He feels no pain when caught beneath a knife. But we are real: you bleed when a door traps your thumb and bumps don't disappear when tea trays smack your head (and I apologise for that — an accident I swear!) So please, my son, re-latch the safety, lower the gun and tell me what your Nan has done to make you mad like Butch who's lost his bone? And why insist on silver slugs? I know Nan smells a bit like dogs, and yes she howls. It's sad! But she's your Nan, and you are part of our tribe."
Pieces of Rik
New endeavours excite me. They also scare me. I believe most people share similar emotions about new things - that uncomfortable balance of joy as they explore possibilities, mixed with cold jags of fear: what can go wrong? Will I be damaged? Humiliated?
This new endeavour - Substack - tips me towards the scarier side of that equation. Substack is more than just an email list. It's a place where people who believe they have something to say to the world can find people who want to hear what they're saying and deliver those words straight into their inboxes ... or so the theory goes.
I've been here before, with blogs. I've had several blogs over the decades, and I've gathered some learnings about self-promotion through those cycles of hope and abandonment. The most important lesson is that the strangers reading my words don't much care about the thoughts and emotions I've conjured into their minds.
No. What people want is me.
I'm not great at sharing me. I was born with a healthy streak of selfishness tangled through my marrow. And some of the key lessons my early life taught me were about how to build walls, and how to keep those walls sturdy and strong.
And yet somehow I've ended up as a poet. Surely everything I've just written about selfishness and strong walls goes against the very core of what poetry is supposed to be? What about Truth, or Beauty? What about revelations and confessions?
Every poem is A Lie. Or, more accurately, every poem is a machine built of words which has the potential to trigger a response in whoever hears or reads those words.
And every poet is A Liar because they know how to build those word machines in ways which will (when they work) trigger a cascade of required thoughts and emotions in strangers they've never, nor will ever, meet.
You may think that by reading this post you're gaining an insight into me. But is that true?
Abusing poetry for fun and profit
I started writing poetry soon after I hit puberty. Luckily for the world those poems all died in a kitchen fire that may-or-may-not have been an act of arson.
My second bout of poetry started after I lost my virginity in my mid-twenties. The activity went hand-in-hand with me losing my sanity, because the person I lost my virginity to came equipped with a penis and, until that moment, I had built my personality and worldview around the belief that I was a straight (if rather gauche and unattractive) male.
Back in those days writing poems was an approved form of self-medicated therapy. Not that I believed I was in need of such help: denial is wide and deep river, fertile with delusions and deceits.
Kingfisher Pool Once I found a waterfall. I watched the kingfisher perched on his rock. With a blue flume he dove deep to the abyss and surfaced with gaping bream in his beak. I started — and stalled. A fear of water caressing the face held me as a stringed mannequin — shrinking the bollocks as again the kingfisher wet his oval head. Perched on his rock after, one feathered eye spoke: scared of the waters? Maybe a muscle rippled, as slowly a shirt was un-burdoned and dropped. A quick circle of glancing stare was touched on the barricade trees as button-holes puckered their mouths wide, and the denims fell — expertly crumpled. Dive! The beak chattered. Dive to touch the stones where the glass Sargasso elvers grow, eating worms. And I dared. As a pink walrus tattooed here and there with hair on hide, I plunged within the waterfall pool: and mouthed a scream for shock as my bubbles were lifted to the pond-skater home. Cold! The airspheres bellowed. Free!
The key advantage of writing verse is that the results tend to be very short. A person can usually recover from reading one of my efforts in half an hour or so. Alcohol may help dampen the pain, for those of a more sensitive disposition.
The key disadvantage is that writing is, necessarily, a solo activity. Yet a poem that is never heard or read is a poem that has never existed. So as the 1990s commenced I began a new endeavour: poetry workshops.
You want some Truth to go with that Beauty?
The scene of my most heinous crimes against literature was with a group of like-minded grifters in a class called "Poetry in the Making". We convened every Wednesday evening at the City Lit adult education college in Stukely Street, London. For two hours we sat in a circle and took turns reading our latest effort, after which the writer would stay silent as the listeners offered up their reactions to, and critiques of, the words they had just endured.
… It was fucking brutal!
Two minutes into the critique of my first poem I very quickly realised that the words I had presented were juvenile trash. No rhythm; no insight; no coherence. No good! Given that I had put my heart and soul into what I thought was a revelatory and world-changing set of lines I was ... humiliated!
Afterwards, a kind woman took my arm and led me gently out of the building and across the road to the nearest pub. People who an hour before had been busy ripping my self-belief to shreds put their hands into their pockets and bought me beers. They congratulated me for making the effort to present; they shared with me the horrors of their own first efforts. They reminded me that the purpose of the class was to learn how to write poetry that others could appreciate, and hoped I had the capacity to learn because "a couple of those lines had some promising images in them!"
One of the bravest things I have ever done was return to the group the next Wednesday. A few weeks later I presented another poem: the emotional bruises were even worse; the craft insights brighter.
From those lessons I forged some of my most intense friendships. We learned together as we gave our honest reactions to each other's work. We drank together as we carried on eternal discussions of "what is poetry" and "why does it matter" in the pub after class.
We plotted together: from that group arose Magma Poetry - a magazine born from frustrations with the contemporary poetry publishing scene. It's still going strong, long after I left the group and walked away from verse!
Welcome to Rik's Sparky Little Substack Space
All Poems Lie. Except for that spark hidden between the lines that makes the Good Poem sing. That reveals a pulse of adrenaline in the listener's spine, an invasive image in the reader's stream-of-vision.
Welcome to my Substack space! I'm not here to entertain you, though some of my posts may prove to be entertaining. Equally, I'm not here to promote myself or change the world - age has sucked such urgencies from my marrow.
Final words: not all of my posts will involve poems - though (of course!) I might be lying.
Devious bastards, them Poets!