Thursday, July 19, 2007

Another non stop week of talking bollix on the Guardian books blog.

I have been jostling with the numerous staff and commentating bores there since March, when a hack and Blakean scholar called Shirley Dent laid into the Love Poetry Hate Racism events that occured in April in various cities all over the globe, and since then it has become my workspace, of sorts, generating - somehow - 700 pages of blather, though most of it useless for any long term purposes.

But nevertheless, after writing 400 pages in a couple of months, i realised that i had ratcheted up a notch by sheer dint of windic experience and gone from Clio to Anruth (level 5-6 on the bardic qualificational scale) cracking the process of novel writing; as i was churning out a few thousand words a day. And although it was prose i wrote, i imagine the process of writing this way falls into the general scope of novel writing.

It's a great place the books blog, as one lives or dies on the strength of what they say, the eloquence of the words one strings together, and it has led me to higher peaks of poetical understanding, as everything i write there is done with the purpose of seeking these elevated ridges to sing from. The latest blather is all harry potter and before that salman rushdie's nighthood, and the process of churning out 700 pages in four months has tightened up the voice and bestowed a level of skill and understanding that was previously absent, as the gush of language is now at full force and i am dreaming in it, as well as speaking it all day.

Bill Naughton said that he learnt to write by setting aside time in the day to practice it, until he reached a stage where he had learnt to love it, and i took this idea to create the maxin:

What is a love of writing but loving ones Muse?

Simple after the spoil of six years has been extracted. The rubbish and failure we all create on our unique authorial path, and which led me to the theory that we are but the latest brief force of live atop a pyramid of past flesh-fuse of living and dead foerebears.

Two parents, four grands eight greats etc, and so are the sum total of all those lives that went before us, and poetry in its purest form is nought but communing with ghosts, a prayer to self and dialogue with the soul, in the quest to speak of Love, or at least advocate it as poets.

No comments: