ghosts of myself

While doing some other things at the weekend I came across something I didn't know even existed: a fat sheaf of poems I wrote when I was a teenager. I know there are some around the place from when I was younger than that, and there are definitely stories I wrote in primary school; there are also essays, and once I even wrote an opera! (Well. It was two pages long, and I wrote it with a friend. Not like the precocious kids I know nowadays, they all practically have deals.) But these are the real deal, written when I was still demonstrably a kid, but old enough to be "serious" about it. When I read Collected Poems of this and that poet, I've always felt a little bit sad reading their juvenilia, because I don't have any. But now I have! Not only that, but in the strange manner of things that come back to you through time, many of these poems are as familiar as ever, in that their first lines or whatever are very fresh to me.

I'm not going to make many claims for the quality of the poems. I was no Millay writing "Renascence" at 17. But they are reassuring to me, because for one thing they're not as bad as all that: they show promise. For another, though they are full of awful stylistic tics, the voice is recognisably that of me. And some of those stylistic tics I've only managed to shake off within living memory. The good news is that while I was writing like Nikki Giovanni I was reading much more demanding stuff. And it shows.

The other good news is that I already had an ear, I was using assonance and dissonance and some crazy rhymes. I had some rhetorical devices, and ambition: there's a long numbered sequence in there. Mallarmé would be pleased to note that I was writing to the words, not to the idea - though there are certainly ideas aplenty. I was already doing that mixture of soulful and quirky. I haven't even read it all yet. And was it Brodsky? No - Auden, said that you spot a promising young poet by the fact that, however awful their work is, they are clearly in love with words, and experimenting with technique. He said the content can come later.

In the bit I have read, there are two lines in one of the poems that, not only do they sound like me, I can tell you which poem they sound like: it's not going in the book, it's called "Hullaballoo", and although I've always had a soft spot for it I've never felt it quite worked. Here are the two lines:

"While some stay home to tend the goats,
Some go to work in camel coats..."

The rest of it is execrable. But here's another good bit:

"Quiet oasis in this LOUD* desert
of time interrupted by the clatter
chatter**
of this metal pretender box, carefully woodgrained
for the pseudo-elegant effect,
whose pictures, constantly, mean untiringly
nothing.
They shatter me anyway:
oasis a mirage glimmering."

(See, there's me just gearing up for an adult lifetime of ranting on about substandard TV! I love that "constantly, mean untiringly/ nothing." Fine work.)

Or:
"& now I find you gone
I find I've lost a limb
or else I'm out on one"

Or:
"The sun in kindness throws me
handfuls..."***

Most interesting of all, though, is the subjects I was writing about. Some of these poems, given a spit & a polish, could be by, well, me. I clearly have my lifelong obsessions, the things I'm working through and never stop thinking about. Or - as one of them is the ghosts of the past - that never stop thinking about me. (Oooooo-ooooo-oooooo...) They really do presage the whole "Me and the Dead" theme. Here's a whole poem, not that it's that good but I think it is interesting, & surely we can afford to give some indulgence to a 10th-grader:

"You cannot see Connecticut tonight.****
It is covered by mists which are
impenetrable.*****
The Yankee ghosts are home to roost,
sitting on the past,
covering up the present,
floating across the streets
with absent-minded nonchalance
as if the years which intervene
did not exist.
You cannot see Connecticut tonight,
so shrouded in its own debris it is,
so hidden in the drifting mist
of the builders of its houses
that you cannot see
at all."

Well, bless. I think that mini-me did a good job! E'en this very summer I wanted to draft a poem about exactly the same thing: those mists in the woods. And the ghostliness of the whole place, only I now think they're Indian ghosts more than settlers. That particular conceit, of the ghosts being so thick you can't see for them, I actually thought dated from a dream I had when I was about 23, but apparently it was already in place.

Here, for comparison, is the first stanza of the title poem from Me and the Dead:

"Safe in the past where nothing more can happen to them,
they occupy your streets and your favourite buildings
in their ribbons and wigs and silver-buckled shoes.
You often look at pictures of them : they were
more beautiful than the people you know, so serene
in the bright clear colours of the past, with intelligent eyes
and effortless skin tone. You feel a kinship with them.
Reading their letters again you want more, more.
You prowl through their houses ; you run your hand
lightly along the wood, leaning on their door-jambs :
door-jambs with a quaint look, that to them were modern."

And now, good night! When I wake it will be the future. ******

* See, I was reading old Ez...
** Note nasty stylistic tic!
*** See, I was reading Mayakovsky. Sometimes I still write lines that sound like this.
**** See, I was writing my IPs!
***** But then it falls to bits. Come on Kate.
****** Alas, not quite far enough into the future. Another hour or two would do me fine.