Nick Asbury – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

MIGRAINE AND THINGS GOING WRONG

From a creative point of view, it can be more interesting when things go wrong.

There’s wrong and wrong, of course. I don’t mean the kind of wrong that’s clumsy or inept. But maybe the kind of wrong where the idea or the method gets away. That’s interesting. I like the sort of poem that has a mind of its own for example, and seems to do something the poet didn’t (apparently) intend. Sometimes I like poems that go wrong better than poems that go right.

This is perverse, isn’t it? But there you go. A pun there already. We celebrate mistakes instinctively. We make them the root of our jokes. Where would we be without jokes?

I took the HappenStance Story Chapter 7 to the printer on Monday. I was in a rush, as usual, and so was the chapter. I mentioned this to Robert at Dolphin Press. Printers don’t check for proof-reading errors but I got an email message later from Liz (the other half), about a graphic and another small point: And on page 9 he wasnt sure if it was a typing error or not but on the 3rd line it says poets over 4 should that not say 40? Let me know’.

Yes, it should have said 40. Here’s the context: “The majority of manuscripts I receive are by poets over 4. In fact, 40 is pretty young in my terms.” But isn’t it a wonderful mistake? I did correct it (thanks to Robert) but I was so very tempted to leave it. Mistakes make good stories.

The Bank of Scotland, about which I wrote recently, has still not unmangled the mistake they have made with my account. On Friday, which was day 21 of my not being able to pay cheques in, I reached a stage of mild fury. I had tried to get hold of my Relationship Manager, had been promised a call, had not had the call and had insisted on speaking to what I now know is called a ‘team leader’.

In the olden days, banks had managers. Now they have relationship managers, and their bosses are team leaders. Does this sound like banking to you? Nope? Me neither.

Interestingly, though, one of the relationship managers (all the ones I have spoken to have been articulate, charming, young-sounding men, who are clearly not managers, but minions, and my heart goes out to them) was able to give me a date. ‘Chris’ could see an indemnity arrangement, made on 25.05.2005. That was it. That was the permission to pay cheques in to the name ‘HappenStance’.

However, although the indemnity arrangement is recorded, the nature of that arrangement is not noted. Back to the drawing board. Chris told me that talking to a ‘boss’ (the team leader) would not do any good. How right he was. I insisted anyway. I never insist on talking to bosses. I wanted to mark the fact that this was now a crisis. I wanted someone to scribble down, ‘Customer insisted on speaking to Team Leader’.

The team leader, it was, who made me enraged. He was not rude, oh no. He jabbered jargon which I started to write down but it came so thick and fast, it was impossible. I had suggested I would complain. He said something about ‘making an official complaint that highlighted the official areas where the complaint applies’. It wasn’t even English! All he needed to do was listen and say ‘there, there’.

I wish there were solutions to this nonsense. This is not banks making huge monies at our expense. This is huge organisations who are victims of their own systems and frequently employing people with no authority to take meaningful action or, in the team leader’s case, no skill with human beings.

Another mistake then. Another mistake, another story. We haven’t reached the end yet but soon I will ask people to send money in paper notes in envelopes and I will keep the stash in the tea caddy. The risk of burglars is far less than the risk of the bank putting the whole business out of business.

Anyway, back to the migraine. It has been a migrainey week for me, though I’ve had much worse. I’m interested in migraine and what’s going wrong in the brain when they happen, interested enough to have read Oliver Sacks’ book on the subject (and it’s one of his hard books, not one of the readable ones). Sacks loves the excitement of malfunction. Often he demonstrates how it leads to creative perceptions you couldn’t get any other way.

Every weakness opens us to strength. I am on number 56 of the 77 poetry submissions. (Next week I expect to have finished and report back). I have become, I realise, mainly a disappointment disseminator. This seems such a negative function, so fraught with guilt and responsibility and neurosis, that I frequently don’t like myself much.

On the other hand, the nature of disappointment is fascinating and, in some contexts, funny. I’m reminded of Nick Asbury’s Disappointments Diary, which I think so masterfully funny. Not everyone would agree of course, but I’m persuaded the friends to whom I gave it will share my view. On the promotional page, you can see one of the page headers: ‘Genius is 99% perspiration and you’ve mastered that bit’. Poetry becomes so intense, so delicate, so personal. What on earth are we doing when we write it? I don’t know. I never did know. I just find it interesting that people do it, that I do it. We are all mad probably.

Back to migraine. Lots of poets have migraine. I do wonder whether the best poems aren’t a kind of disruption of the brain. I think poetic form, whatever we mean by that term, can introduce disruptions that make something unexpected happen. Something unexpected should happen in a poem, shouldn’t it?

I wrote about Paul Lee in November 2011. Paul died before he was supposed to. He and I both had migraines and both wrote poems. We both even wrote poems about migraines, and swapped notes about this at one point.

In Us: Who Made History, Paul’s posthumous collection from Original Press, there is a marvellous migraine poem. It incorporates ‘the verb thing’ (one of the ‘flaws’ I keep going on about) but it is more than the sum of its parts. It is a strength out of weakness. I’ll stand by that.

Migraineur

I will know light as camera flash
and breaking glass. Your consoling touch
will hurt, my flesh a ripe fruit bruising.

Noise will be a steady crescendo,
taste a meld of metal, eggs and bile,
smell a constant brink of gagging.

I can tell you that scotoma is a drift
of soot flakes across your vision,
a vision that fractures and scintillates

with an aura that bathes the world
in St Elmo’s fire, shot with blue or yellow
lightning flashes.
………………………This is not understatement.

There is also the fever and chills, like flu,
the nausea and vomiting. And the pain –
ah, yes, the pain – that mocks analgesics,

resists agonists: pain like a billiard ball
potted behind your eye, a red-hot toad,
a pyramid of razor edges and needle points.

My doctors shuffle their drugs,
discuss my triggers.
…………………….A healer once suggested
that migraines assuaged my need for pain.

THE BEAUTY OF RHYME

It’s a gorgeous thing when a poem arrives at a felicitous rhyme, a choice word that pops up by happenstance.

At least so it seems to me. It’s a popular misconception that rhyming verse is ‘out’. It’s not. It just has to be done with beauty and grace. It’s a matter of balancing the expected (the chime, the echo) with the unexpected (the word not anticipated).

Of course, these days, the concept of ‘rhyme’ in poetry has stretched. Now the word is often applied to the most minute assonance, the half-rhyme that’s only a quarter, or the uneasy pairing of a stressed and un-stressed syllable.

Like King John and his feeling about getting nuts for Christmas, I do like perfect rhyme (I mean ‘perfect’ only in the sense that the same stressed syllable and the same vowel sound match completely.) And yes, it can sound tired and all too guessable. But that’s why it’s difficult, though still, I think, not impossible to achieve with a degree of panache. And no, it’s not in the least ‘fashionable’ in serious poems, but someone in me – call her Matilda – does it even more, because of that.

All of this is by way of prologue to more words on Wrapper Rhymes. ‘Wrapper Rhymes’ are, you may remember, poems written  on wrappers, following the example set by Ted Hughes,  who wrote a Tunnocks wrapper poem in 1986. Ted on Tunnocks rhymed, and so do most of the examples being collected and displayed by Nick Asbury at http://wrapperrhymes.tumblr.com/

I became obsessed with these delights in the summer. ‘Obsessed’ is probably not too strong a word’ since I wrote about 23 in the space of a month, almost enough to qualify me for NaPoWriMo without even trying. But it’s not just a matter of coming up with a couple of verses that match a product. The Wrapper Rhyme has to be written on the wrapper. I had to acquire special pens, because many wrappers refuse to accept ink, as you’ll see if you go to the site to view some of the contributions. But that in itself becomes part of the point.

At the Scottish Poetry Library – where a busy book fair was held yesterday with some marvellous people and wonderful conversations – there was a discussion about poetry publishing on Friday evening. The word ‘demand’ came up. Stuart Kelly (writer and literary editor of Scotland on Sunday) suggested, rather neatly, that today’s poetry publishers were better at publishing ‘on demand’ than ‘creating a demand’ for their products.

I’m not convinced it’s a publisher’s job to create demand, though it’s certainly in the publisher’s interest to do just that, were it possible. The discussion did not go on to explore this idea but many of us assembled at the book fair in the same venue the very next day spoke about it. Would poems be ‘in demand’ if downloadable from i-Tunes? No, Kevin Cadwallender tells me i-Tunes is less than cool with the young. Would they be in demand if it was illegal to download them? Would they be in demand if read by the author and listenable to on line? Would they be in demand if printed on cakes? (Don’t scoff, it’s being done.) Would they be in demand in holograph and framed?

Possibly. It depends who wrote them. If the writer (like Ted) becomes a scion of Literature or is en route to scion-ship, there’s something to be said for the ephemeral poem, the verse written by hand and almost (but not quite) thrown away. This idea is preserved on WrapperRhymes, where you get the poem and you get the wrapper on which it was written, by hand, in a unique, once-and-forever format.

So this week, if you want to, you can see one of mine, done on a box of Jelly Babies. I am a little too fond of Jelly Babies, so it was a very large box, half-price, bought last February (left over from Christmas). But Nick’s editorial comment brings the work a smidgeon of gravitas. Yep – naming the Jelly Babies was perhaps not the best ever marketing decision for Cadbury.

If you’re a HappenStance subscriber, this is a good point to remind you about my chocolate appeal. I’m hoping, in the distant future, to do a pamphlet or small book on a chocolate theme. There aren’t, it seems to me, enough poems about chocolate, and very few celebrating it. I’d like some. It doesn’t matter whether or not they rhyme, though it would be nice if some did, but they mustn’t be too long because each one has to fit inside a page. 16 lines or under would be good. This mouthwatering opportunity is only for HappenStance subscribers, I’m afraid, but anybody can become one.

So far, very few chocolate poems have arrived on my desk, though a couple of those that have made it are winners. The deadline is . . . er . . . when I get enough good chocolate poems to make a full box. If your poem’s selected for this box — I mean book — , I’ll send you some copies AND a small amount of first-class chocolate – that’s the deal. And then you can write a wrapper rhyme on the wrapper. . . .

NO NEED FOR A NOTEBOOK!

Remember the days when you would read anything? The small print on a bar of chocolate, the rubbish on a packet of cornflakes?

And then, some people would also write on anything. Graffiti folk on walls and bridges. Drunks on beer mats. Children on books and wallpaper. Poets on anything at all.

Scribbling memorably – a human instinct as old as print itself.

I had an emotionally turbulent week last week. However, a small calm place in the middle of this was Nick Asbury’s Wrapper Rhymes project.

From this I learned that St Andrews University, only 20 miles from my home, is home to an august body known as The Tunnocks Caramel Wafer Appreciation Society, a club which this year has no fewer than 120 members and whose president is a fourth year student of astrophysics.

The TCWAS is a whole separate entity from Tunnocks, the noble Scottish family firm which still manufactures the caramel wafers I so often eat instead of lunch.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes – the museum of the University of St Andrews is currently exhibiting a Tunnocks Caramel Wafer wrapper sporting a handwritten poem by Ted Hughes. It is one of three wrappers to inspire the bard.

And this wrapper, having inspired the poet, subsequently inspired the museum to make it a feature for exhibition, then inspired the Scottish Poetry Library to post a picture of the wrapper poem. This, in turn, led to a Twitter conversation between the Scottish Poetry Society, Inpress Books, Glasgow Design Firm Effective Studio and Nick Asbury, of Asbury and Asbury.

Phew. The Twitter conversation (who says Twitter is mindless rubbish?) focused on the idea that wrapper poetry might be a whole new genre.

Could this be? Would you like it to be? Read on.

WrapperRhymes is about to be a whole collection of poems written  on wrappers, following the example set by Ted Hughes. It has been launched by Nick Asbury, using a beautifully designed platform (Effektive Studio) and a lovely little Asbury piece on a Chewits wrapper.

Submissions are invited. It’s free. How could you resist?

But wait. It’s hard to write on a caramel wafer paper. The waxy surface, with smears of chocolate (who left this in the sun?) is resistant. However, it’s not impossible, as Ted demonstrated.

Between periods of turbulence, I have spent a week considering which wrappers you can write on and which you can’t. Ah, it is not as easy as in Ted’s day. Back in 1986, when y-fronts went out and boxer shorts came in, a wrapper might have been silver paper (as we called it then) underneath but a good, old, paper outer-sleeve offered its services on most confectionery products.

And now? I leapt at the opportunity of a KitKat, (which still sells with a paper sleeve as well as the shiny version) but I imagine so did several other would-be wrapper rhymers. I had to cheat with a Curlywurly, although it strikes me as just possible a CD marker might write on that slippery surface. Equally, it might not.

Green & Blacks Organic was better. I have eaten several bars this week while thinking about the possibilities. You can just about write on the waxed wrapper as well as the outer paper. In fact, this week I’ve eaten things I’ve resisted for years, just while exploring the wrapper possibilities.

But oh how things have changed! Do you realize how many chocolate bars are wrapped in a slippery sleeve that nobody could write on? We’re mainly enticed by wrappers made of plastic and aluminum laminates, a combination described by those in the know as “extremely durable, both chemically and physically”. That means not only can you not write on it (unless you cheat in some way – labels, post-its etc), but, unlike poetry, it will probably never die. (I know your alter-eco can make more things out of them, but you almost certainly won’t.)

Meanwhile, there are a few things you can still write on. I’m about to consume breakfast cereal. It comes in a box. You can write inside a box, while thinking outside it, and munching. I could probably fit an epic inside some boxes . . . .