Putting a Patchen on it

I don’t often use this space to write about my own work, but after all, this website is about my own work. It’s about my work in editing, teaching, and writing — and amazingly, I have been writing again recently. It feels great, like not being a fraud any more.

Because really, who can be very happy when they’re not writing? It’s like the floodgates are closed, but with the flood kept in. It’s like I can hear everything that’s going on outside, but the window is shut. It’s like when you dream that you’re waking up but you can’t move. You’re speaking but no one can hear you.

Except that when you really aren’t writing, you can’t even find the words. It’s horrible. This condition comes to me from time to time, like insomnia, and one episode that made it really bad was the lockdown. It was too much like a vacuum. I tried all kinds of ruses, as we do: Write about what’s out the window. Write about what’s in the room. Write your most over-the-top, bored-shitless, frustrated, lonely and grief-stricken interior monologue. (You can bet that last one didn’t work! Although one of them I did manage to repurpose into a funny poem in two parts, the second of which is doggerel. Still unpublished, if you want it.)

But was this the kind of work I wanted to be writing? I had rooftops, and empty little town, and an allotment at my disposal. And virtually no form to speak of, just polite lightly accented free verse, droning down the page… It was boring me, even though I got reasonable mileage out of it. It felt dutiful, fake. In fact I was becoming a seething ball of rage: at the world, at the lockdown, at the government, at everyone who got to be locked down in their own neighbourhood with their own family & friends nearby — at everything. And I was just writing blah blah blah.

Also, of course, I have a book I’m meant to be writing, about the year I lost my home and months of sofa-surfing. I’ve worked on this in fits and starts, because it’s frankly quite difficult being in such a challenging situation and immersing yourself in yourself in another one. It was easier writing about other people, so I’ve added a lot of researched material, and changed the focus a little. It’s the only way of making sense of things. (It’s so nearly done now! Very high on the to-do list.)

Well then, last August America was pulling out of Afghanistan and the enormity of it for the Afghans knocked me for six. Poleaxed. That Saturday when we were all watching in horror as the Taliban advanced on Kabul, I found the budgie who had been my faithful companion all through the lockdown and before it lying on the floor of his cage, dead. Later that day I went for a Long-Covid-related ECG. That weekend I wrote a poem. The first one in ages that had even begun to get at my real feelings.

That felt good! (And later it was taken by The Honest Ulsterman.)

But it still wasn’t touching the sides. I thought of my friend Peter and his mother’s old biscuit tin full of cut-out words. Simple yet effective, for him at least, so I took out an old knackered book I’d had since I was 15, The Collected Poems of the proto-beat poet Kenneth Patchen, and started cutting it up. Patchen’s tone is high, and his poems are very uneven, but his phrases were much too good to take apart; who cares about colours when you can have stripes? I found myself cutting little confetti-strips with images or half-sentences on them. It didn’t take long to realise that I wasn’t going to be able to use any other words or phrases, that Patchen was speaking to me loudly in a voice I already knew well, that he was exhorting me to something, and that I was already in a conversation with him alone. He — my old poet daddy, master of discomfort & personal doubt, rager against the machine — told me he was going to free me from the confines of my lockdown displacement and that stifling politeness that (I think) must have come from the coruscating need for gratitude that homelessness (and that a new home, even one that’s far from home) foists on you. He promised me a return to myself, and isn’t each of us our own first home? I don’t have a biscuit tin so I put them in a round, flat cardboard box that used to have a big delicious chocolate wafer from Warsaw in it.

When I was a teenager I loved this book to death. That it was in shreds testifies to his draw on my unformed mind, my need for external engagement, for the world, for politics, for great sweeps of Language with a capital L. And to my need to work out, once again, in my displaced state, who I am this time.

Because I had been badly displaced the first time, too. From a much smaller city and a whole life. It’s not as if using cut-up phrases or words is a newfangled technique. Nothing is that kind of revolutionary or 'innovative’ any more. But it was the right one for the right moment; and after all, writing is conversation. And when we really write we are inventing something totally new every time. Even so, it never occurred to me that I’d be putting myself back into that woods-surrounded bedroom in a little Victorian house with fishscale shingles on it, up a little hill in Collinsville, CT, where I once, long ago, also felt like a fish out of water… and it took me a few months to realise this was what I was doing. I wrote a lot of poems in that room, too.

This is what happens when we write: we do something we don’t even know what it is. You go deep inside yourself, ideally while looking outward, and project yourself on an insoluble question — and maybe you come up with a partial answer. (It’s never the whole answer; how could it be? This is good news, by the way.) My friend Joe this morning posted a paragraph on Facebook about a stone near a bench on a boardwalk in Kent, and by the end of that paragraph he practically was that stone. You have to invest yourself, your real self, and what you’ll get back you never know in advance.

The morning after the cutting-up session I arranged four or five of Patchen’s phrases very quickly & matter-of-factly, like someone laying out tarot cards, one under another. A poem came bursting out round and through them. Three in a row. The next day four came in an hour. And so on. I would just keep going each time till the tap slowed to a trickle. It slowed down, of course, but seven months later, I have 41 poems, and over ten have been published. These phrases of Patchen’s have sparked a conversation with him, and myself, about politics, personal responsibility, death, bereavement, climate change, war, abortion rights, birds, flowers… They’ve got me writing in a looser & more open style, more like myself in fact. The device has served me really well in a year of awful upheavals — just when we thought the world might be beginning to recover from its recent trauma.

You can see one of them on this blog, and others in the autumn/winter 2021 issue of Raceme magazine, in Blackbox Manifold 27 (Winter 2021), four in the April 2022 issue of Shearsman magazine, and one forthcoming on the Poetry Wales blog, with a little interview about how it was written.

[A slightly expanded version of this post can be seen on my Substack page.]