evo devo 1

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Evo Devo — Writing Poetry

Those who know
They don't let it show
They just give you one long glance
And you'll go oh, oh, oh, oh.

Goes to show
How winds blow
The weather's fine
And i feel so, so, so, so, so.

Birds of prey
With too much to say
Oh what could be my destiny
Another rainy day.

Why ask why
For by the by and by,
All mysteries are just more
Needles in the camel's eye.

— Brian Eno, 1974

“All mysteries are just more / Needles in the camel’s eye.” It was 1974, I was seventeen, and I thought that line was brilliant. To the point where I wrote a poem in the notebooks I kept at that time called “Wish I Had Said That” prominently quoting the sentiment.

The above lyrics are from the first song on Brian Eno’s first solo album post-Roxy Music,  “Needles in the Camel’s Eye”. There was a lot I didn’t know about poetry at that time. Or song lyrics.

A few years ago I read a biography of Brian Eno and discovered how he often composed his song lyrics. He would get most of the music recorded, then play it and babble anything that came into his head that seemed to fit the instrumentation. Until he had something with a semblance of meaning.

If I had known that at the time …

Being completely text-oriented when I was seventeen, it was inconceivable to me that a musician wouldn’t carefully compose the poem acting as lyrics for a song first, being extremely careful and hopefully brilliant in his play of language, and then add the music itself as an afterthought. To be honest, I couldn’t make out what the hell Brian Eno was singing most of the time in that opening song. To this day, I swear the first line is really “Balls, you know!” Maybe if I’d had access to the full lyrics earlier, I might have had second thoughts about the compositional process I naturally assumed Eno must be employing … I mean, “The weather's fine / And i feel so, so, so, so, so.”?

Glad I didn’t say that.

However, at seventeen, I was only obsessed with why I couldn’t write brilliant phrases like “needles in a camel’s eye”? There was obviously something seriously wrong with my imagination, given I couldn’t be that clever on demand.

It was many years later … 

In my mid-thirties, something made me start experimenting with language strictly as language. By this point I had recognized the value of random composition sometimes delivering gems you would never have thought of deliberately. But I was also well aware most exercises in random composition only did end up as so much babble. And without a soundtrack to attach it to, the babble didn’t have much, if any, value.

Don’t ask me where I came up with this process, it was pre-surgery and I really can’t conceive how I thought of it now. But for a good six months, this is how I pursued writing.

I was writing poetry. Nominally. I would start with a situation, a theme, an emotional memory, or a line I stole from someone else I really liked. Then I would write babble for two or three pages on that concept, in six line stanzas that just went on and on and on unreadably. Then I’d take one of a pair of dice, and a deck of cards, and I would work out a method for randomly recombining all the lines I wrote into new configurations. Then I would go through these new configurations and pick out the bits I liked. Which rarely represented more than three or four percent of the total I had written.

I was essentially compacting three pages down into ten or twelve lines. Which I would then restructure as necessary, adding grammar and punctuation as I deemed appropriate, always relating back to my original concept for the piece, no matter how transmorphed that had grown in my random reapplication of word order. This is a typical example of a result:

There Must Be A Punchline

What do I take

from the deeds of Mankind,

supreme monster of grace?

A year-long rhapsody

never to be defeated,

to be crowned in a ring

of paralyzing, surprising joy

over the moment

he threw fire in the eyes

of the large and momentous;

the fire of grace and conflict

bursting from the earth

a tattooed dream of astonishment,

with a superhuman, monumental effort — 

but more than that.

What watcher may judge

the beauty of impossible odds?

Lost after all these years

of treachery, deception,

the bell tolls for thee, Mankind —

not good versus evil.

I often cheered for evil.

In the beautiful, mystic rhythm,

a perfect sense of balance.

Now so rarely do I leap from my chair

threatened by the monster, Mankind.

There are no rude monsters

so beautiful as he,

or the rhapsody that soothed him.

All the tattered warriors streaming,

Leave them now.

There must be a punchline.

It’s about wrestling. Obviously.

At least, it was when I started writing it. Even I’m not certain what it really says now, but it’s bii-ii-iig. Grew entirely out of hand. Says more to me at the end than I ever meant for it to do at the beginning.

The problem was, the first time I used this method, I came up with what might be what I consider the best poem I ever wrote. After a result like that, I had to continue. Most of what followed turned out like “Punchline”, and I’ve eliminated them from my current repertoire over time. A lot didn’t turn out at all. No matter how many times I threw the dice or dealt the cards or took a hammer to the concept, I could not draw any worthwhile meaning out of the words.

But the exercise was invaluable. It taught me never to fear words, and to always look for the unexpected combination. And when the method really worked, whooo …

traveling wrongward

Beyond the moment of sudden discovery,

beyond perception,

in the secret place

that is not secret

but openly judged by others,

I straddle flesh and nakedness

and sweat in the swampy heat

embracing the sin of misdirection,

following the dwindling river

into the wet murk,

through green filament trees,

piercing needles of shadow

a ceiling between the thin sun

and my body.

The great water recedes

in my memory, whispering:

“she is not here, this is not home,

these are only ghosts, exquisitely within ... “

And the river feeds me

to the dagger of gloom.

Exactly what I wanted to say. But not how I might have contrived to express myself consciously.

So, independently in a way, here I was, doing much the same as Brian Eno did when he wrote those early songs. I had my music track — my original concept for the poem, the emotion or the situation behind it — and I babbled words to fit that theme until I had something I was satisfied worked.

And eventually it struck me. The poem was never only as good as the words constructing it. If the feeling behind the words wasn’t there as well, the emotional content fully present and clearly expressed, the poem was never really going to rise.

And that’s when things got really interesting …

***************

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Theda Bara’s winning novelletta Thirty-One Across continues this Friday at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

When it all gets too much, do we seek to numb ourselves or self-inflict pain to remind us we are still there? And can our heroine tell the difference any more?