writing, eh!

One thing that's happened lately is I seem to be writing again. Of course, the whole time I've been sick I've written Baroque; in fact, for a long time this is the only thing that was going along normally.

A couple of weeks ago something changed - like my brain woke up. It really is as if the infected blood was going through my braincells, making them lurch around in a cumbersome way - and now, at last, the blood going through there is more like clean. I suddenly feel clearer (though still easily tired) at work, which of course has the unfortunate effect of involving me in more work (unfortunate because still tired; last week, for example, I think I overdid it, I'm still knackered); with the result that I've now totally got my editor's head back on. I finished a really hard, and long, piece of work last week* - well, it's with the authors for final corrections (the only feedback so far is that they abominate and revile my wonderful title) and must go off to layout by Friday. (Now, there's a challenge, with my negotiated short days! Last Tuesday I was there till 6.30, which is not the idea.)**

Even more striking, suddenly I'm working on something like five poems! That's more poems than I've written in the past five months, and I think they're better, too. I've pulled out an old one and determined how to make it work after several years of not working. It seems to be a companion to a new piece. Just this weekend I had two of those ideas that you just write down, one based on a wordplay that popped into my head as I was going to sleep - I reached for the laptop and wrote it in half an hour - and one which I wrote yesterday sitting in the pub, a funny thing that happened when I was seven.

And I'm restarting the critical engines. For a practice run this week I knocked off a bagatelle: a 1,500-word review of Ian Duhig's new book for thepoem.co.uk. I'll post in an excerpt from it, once it's published. (I say bagatelle; I did a careful job on it, of course.) I've got a lot of MacNeice to get through before my operation - I shouldn't even be writing here now - and of course my long (10,000 words in draft) interview with Ruth Fainlight to finish (I think it's going to be really fun, by the way; it's been really fun to do).

And the pieces I wrote in here about my family, after scanning in those family pictures last week, felt very important (I know this is "all a bit me me me," as Tishani Doshi would put it; sorry about that) too; they felt like a springboard. Maybe to something big, who knows. Clearly one's childhood is sitting in one all the time, crouched, like a tiger waiting to spring.

The point? The point is that this is a lot of different kinds of writing I'm doing. It's like getting five heads back. Each kind of writing has its pitfalls, and it strikes me that the strengths of one are the pitfalls of another. Writing poetry, for example, is like channelling something inside that you aren't completely in control of - hence the fact that when I wrote my swineherd poem under the influence of germs I didn't even recognise it a month later! You dredge stuff up, hardly knowing what you're likely to get, and then impose order on it; or, if working in any kind of form, you dredge it up and impose order at the same time. (I always work in enough form that there's some ordering going on in the first draft; it evolves as you go.)

Lots has been written on how the strictures of rhyme, etc, can be like a dam that forces the water to flow in a new direction - bringing out connections and words you might never have thought of otherwise. It is a little harder, though why the hell shouldn't it be, than just spewing stuff onto a piece of paper. And one of my new poems is not only a commentary-through-description of an atrocity of the 12th century, it is in rhyming couplets. (Hence my sudden yen to review the Duhig! I've gatecrashed his party. But I brought my own wine.) Right now that poem is maybe 75% there, but it needs a final push which is having to wait. That does take a mental energy, as well as being in the right space to see it.

Anyway, so there's the spewing and channelling and pushing. And there's the order-imposing, which is like the editing head at work. And there's the editing head itself, which is order-imposing plus respecting the needs of the authors plus of the organisation, plus being very facts-and-methodology-based. As the editor you aren't really present, except as the voice of the author or the organisation. It's empirical, but also instinctive. In that way it's almost like writing poetry: you have to switch into the right gear...

"Fact-based" leads us to the pitfalls of reviewing and critical analysis - where one after all does not want to make a total prat of oneself, making spurious connections or ignoring the bleedin' obvious. For instance I did pull three earlier books by Duhig off the shelf and refresh my memory, and jolly glad I am that I did! I saw poems in there that I'd forgotten all about, which make it clear that - but no. Save that for the review.

Hard to go from that straight into MacNeice though, he's such a different mood. And I've got this deadline: June 26th. My operation is on the 28th. You can't finish everything by the 26th, and it's only a little operation. I have to get the MacNeice draft in then, though, it is a Deadline. Other things will have to wait, I suppose; though even aside from the irrational fears, there is the worry about having a fuzzy head again. So, no pressure!

Then there's blogging, which can be an absolute minefield, as one is basically spouting. Hm. Oil field, I should say. I mean it is opinions and observations, and we all know these can be dangerously half-baked. Hm, an oven. A hotbed? It is personality-based, but then one wants content. It's not journalism: access to primary sources is limited, and anyway one already has a full-time job, three kids and a lot of writing to do. That leaves opinion and general waggery. Polemics can be an irritant, as can mixed metaphors.

Yesterday's post: that turned out to be an irritant. And I did, I admit, make a polemical leap, and skipped one element of the equation. I did that semi-aware; at some level I probably made a poetic , as opposed to rational, decision to be unreliable and "authentic." (In personality terms, as well as in poetry, the untrue can point to - or even be - the True. But this is a dangerous policy when dealing with other people, or important ideas.) Did it destroy my argument? In terms of making it less reliable, probably. Or not. I can't tell, because I'm the unreliable narrator! And there's me, saying I value clarity of thought.

Then there's the memoir angle - different from straight autobiography, as I think a memoir retains more of the present in it. Looking at the past, re-evaluating it, or - as re Günter Grass , last week - re-evaluating one's previous edit of it. And here, as with reviewing, one wants to get one's facts, one's hem or tie, straight - one doesn't want to be the crazy relative at the wedding - one wants to get it right, as the only fitting hommage to one's beloved relatives.

But it's like poetry, where you need to allow the craziness, the individual perspective, some headspace: the unreliable narrator can be, strangely, the very thing that makes it real. But you, the writer, have to be in control of your own unreliable narrator, as well as responsible for the wellbeing of your family, who are under your hands almost as if you were a surgeon...

It's strange work, eh!


* Admittedly, at one point it was so hard I cried.

** the list of things I have to organise before I go off on the 26th would make a really husky, burly grown man weep. Not a very sensitive one, either. A brute of a fellow. He'd be weeping.