“Right,” said Aiblins, smiling and nodding.
“You have also learned from some very abstruse poets, Donne and Hopkins. Am I correct?”
“Eh?” said Aiblins.
“Have you read John Donne and Gerald Manley Hopkins?”
“No. Wait a minute. Yes. I once dipped into them but my work is original. I hear it inside this.”
Aiblins tapped the side of his head with a finger.
“Never mind, Leavis says inspiration is often unconscious reminiscence. Now, creative writing teachers usually, and wisely, urge young writers to use the plainest, commonest words because many of the profoundest and loveliest and funniest ideas have been put into plain words. To be or not to be, that is the question. I wish I were where Helen lies. So you despise me, Mr Gigadibs.” “No,” said Aiblins reassuringly.
“I was quoting Browning. Now these well-meaning instructors forget that the same great wordsmiths very often relax or ascend into sonorous complexities: sharked up a list of lawless resolutes, and Eleälé to the asphaltic pool, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name, (and here I flatter you) a hypochondriac heart, chilled by the spittle of toads that croack on the moon’s cryptic hemisphere. That line of yours is absurdly pompous, grotesque, almost insane but!” (I started laughing) “It works! We are often depressed for reasons we don’t understand but feel are caused by something huge, vague and distant, something …” (I paused on the verge of saying weird, an Ian Gentle word) “… something uncanny that might as well be on the moon.”
Aiblins, who had looked puzzled for a moment, smiled then said “Right.”
“But I want to point out that these are the first poems of a very young writer, someone who is (please excuse the simile) like a bird flapping its wings to attract attention before launching into the air. You know that because it is your only theme. You should now—”
“Excuse me,” said Aiblins quietly yet firmly. “Are these my poems?”
He lifted the folder from the desk, glanced inside then laid it back, shaking his head, smiling and saying, “Yes, my poems dressed in tartan. Women are incredible. What can you do with them? You were saying?”
“The theme of all your poems is the great poet you are going to be. It is a prologue to your life’s work, a convincing prologue, but not enough.”
“Why not?”
“Take the first poem, the best, and the first verse, also the best: Bone caged, blood clagged, nerve netted et cetera. You are describing a state of confinement and frustration everyone has sometimes felt, poets and housewives and schoolchildren and ditch diggers and college lecturers. Right?”
“Hm. Maybe,” said Aiblins.
“Verse two. Loft-haunter, tunnel-groper, interloper et cetera. Here you state your feelings of being both above and below other people, being an outsider as we called ourselves in the sixties, so you’re still talking for a lot of people, especially young ambitious ones. Right?”
“You’re getting warm.”
“Then comes I am the Titan and my pen et cetera. You now declare yourself a masterful figure like Prometheus, someone who will help humanity recover something fine that it has spoiled and lost: innocence perhaps, faith, hope, love — only God knows what. So you are not now speaking for most folk, you are describing what only very confident priests, politicians, prosperious idealists, teachers, artists and writers sometimes feel, while speaking mainly for Luke Aiblins.” Aiblins smiled and nodded.
“Now look at verse three! Crown, King, Divinity, all shall be mine. What do these three words with initial capitals mean?”
“You tell me. You are the grand panjandrum, the salaried professor, the professional critic. I’m just a humble poet. You tell me my meaning.”
“I think they mean that you feel sublimely smug because of your verbal talent.”
“Do you think all my poems convey that?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Even the love poems?”
“Did you write any? Name one.”
“OUTING.”
Opening the folder I said “Let’s hear it!” and read aloud the following.
This sunken track through the rank weeds
of docken, nettle & convolvulus
does not belong to us: only to me
whose nostrils gladly drank the stink
of vegetable sweat,
whose ears sucked in
the sullen whimper of the gnat’s wing,
who gladly felt the wet sting of
smirr upon the cheek.
So do not talk, say no word to me
but walk in stillness on a path of moss,
a slope of trees upon our right hand side
and on our right the cluck & flow
of a wide stream.
I do not know what you see here.
I do not want to know.
For if each tries to see those things
the other sees
our probing eyes will shatter
the brittle matter of the other’s dream
so each of us will be
inside a toneless, tasteless, aimless world of mediocrity.
Walk in my dream and I will walk in yours
but do not try to share our separate dreams.
Two dreams can touch, I think,
but there’s an end
of dreaming if we try to make them blend
for this can only be when both of us lie bare
and I have felt the ripeness of your flesh.
When bodies mix
then even dreams can melt.
“A love poem?” I asked, smiling.
“Why not?”
“It doesn’t give the faintest idea of the companion it addresses, not even her or his sex.”
“Shakespeare’s sonnets aren’t exactly portraits either.”
“True, but it’s clear the people he addresses are fascinating, and that he loves them. You tell your companion to shut up so that you can enjoy some very dull scenery, though at the end you seem to anticipate …”
I hesitated.
“Getting into her knickers?” suggested Aiblins.
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“Low marks for the start and the later poems. What about the last?”
“I’m glad you reminded me!” I said, greatly relieved, “At first it’s bathos didn’t impress me but now I think it is your best piece of verse — truly objective — not self-vaunting at all. You emerge here at last from the shell of your ego. Yes yes yes, here it is—”
A SPELL AGAINST ENVY
Rascals whose energy made history
had splendid banquets, buildings,
songs of praise
they never made. Digestion, rot and fires
undid their solid things. The finest hymns
cannot outlive the language of their choirs.
Only the joy of making things anew
outlive the owners & the makers too —