I had been depressed since I began reading. It was the typical depression: inability to think, to act, to make arrangements with other people, schools, or work schemes. Food was unpalatable, people frightened me, my own mind was a stranger to me.
Without animus or feelings of revenge, I say that it was the secondary school education in Britain which brought on the despair. Reading a few pages of Nietzsche and realising how little I knew and how little prepared for existence I was as a subject, a few pages of Nietzsche set in action something like a process of waking up from a dream. When I awoke from the dream of British childhood in the late twentieth century I found myself badly educated, not wealthy, and in a vast desert of nothingness. And because I was not wealthy or educated, I could not make any change on this vast desert of our country and our world.
What was the desert? Motorways, TVs, supermarkets, employees, and millions of people without any notion of history; an ugly world in which there is nothing glamorous. The music was awful from the shops and radio (if it were good in the past, my education was so poor that I had no idea where to find it). Where God does not exist except in a tiresome and mad way in the minds of the mad.
I had been expelled from the sixth-form art classes for being too good at drawing, and not interested in imitating cave paintings or making papier mache casts, or making collages from bits of newspaper.
I took it upon myself to be Jesus in a time where God is dead. From day to day I sustained myself as an adolescent with the idea that I was going to have a rebirth as Christ. I lived on the outskirts of civilisation, in a farming village in Wales.
A friend of mine, who used to play bass in the band I sang for years before, went to live in London for a year. I went with him, and began my attempt to become part of the literary world of Yeats, Pound and Eliot. It was not successful for various reasons.
One of the reasons I never had a break through to publication was this: the poetry was not very good and could still find nothing to write about, if I could even write anything at all through the despair. Since then I worked on two big poems and these were submitted to Faber and Faber and others.
I suppose the last time I bothered to send them to these pretend poetry publishers was in 2006, when I approached quite a few of them with manuscript pages. The rejection letters came to me from home while I was in the first months of my tour of Iraq.
The poetry I was working on at that time, and which was rejected by those magazines and publishers, is to be found in my book on Iraq. Something about the coincidence of being rejected while also being in such a bad position (and poetry is absolutely associated with the threat of death) has made me disinclined to offer my work to any professional publisher again.
--
The new poets listed prominently in the depressing book shops of a British street stand out: Pam Ayers and that Liverpool poet, employed by the BBC. These people to me are like garlic to a vampire. Let poetry book sellers and publishers have their Pam Ayers and their fay Liverpudlians.
--
Art is a mirror of existence; or a mirror of the self at least. And the mirror should be specially silvered so as to show the Christian or religious aspects of existence - things which are not apparent in it when we live it simply and unreflectively.
It wants to be seen or heard, and what I am not is somebody whose art is seen or heard in any way. And yet, this is good in the following way: in a time when everything is for sale, then what is and has always been priceless (poetry) has no place. Let the world fall to ruins if it makes no place for what is eternal and what shows the truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment