We were the last to leave. Outside the pub, as we were about to head off in our separate directions, Douglas turned to me and grabbed hold of my sleeve.
‘Thank you, Brian,’ he said.
I was rather taken aback.
‘What for?’ I asked him. ‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Why, for putting up with me, of course! For letting me be a part of your club!’ he exclaimed.
It had been a couple of years since Douglas had been out shaking a tin for the Royal British Legion and stumbled across Poetry Club. Encouraged onto the stage by Chandrima, he’d given us ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ to unanimous acclaim (Toby Salt wasn’t there that evening). The next month he was back. This time with a recital of ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’:
Yet beautiful and bright he stood,
As born to rule the storm;
A creature of heroic blood,
A proud though childlike form.
His knowledge of poetry didn’t stretch much further than a few learnt-by-rote classics from his schooldays but somehow that didn’t matter at all.
‘There’s really no need to thank us, Douglas. We should be thanking you,’ I reassured him. ‘We’re glad to have you in the club.’
‘That’s very kind of you to say so,’ he said. ‘But I know I must be a disappointment to you all on the poetry front.’
I made a snort of protestation. ‘Come now, Douglas,’ I said. ‘You know as well as I do that Poetry Club isn’t really about the poetry.’
For a moment, I thought he was going to cry. Then, as if pulling himself together, he suddenly stood to attention, saluted and marched off purposefully down the street.
Wednesday April 4th
Apropos of nothing at all, I’ve had the sudden realisation that I don’t really write love poems. Proper love poems, that is. I think it might be good for me as a writer to attempt one of these for next month’s Poetry Club.
Also, as I added up the subs from last night, it occurred to me this evening that we haven’t yet asked Liz whether she’d like to join us on our Poets on the Western Front trip. What an oversight on our part! I think her sunny presence would help to offset all that morbid battlefield gloominess.
Thursday April 5th
It’s a dangerous business going into a bookshop. You step across the threshold, and if you don’t stay focused, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to. I’d only wandered in to get a copy of Wuthering Heights for this month’s book group but I ended up emptying my wallet: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez; The Nation’s Favourite Love Poems; The Soulmate Experience: A Practical Guide to Creating Extraordinary Relationships; a cookbook entitled 101 Things to Do with Quinoa; and The Observer’s Book of Molluscs.
I had planned to write a poem this evening but ran out of time, having spent it rearranging my bookshelves to accommodate the new arrivals – without much success, it must be said. There are now books resting on top of other books and piles are forming on the floor.
Friday April 6th
At 11.30, I posted up another poem on Twitter:
On tentaclehooks I wait,
in the deep ocean dark,
for the right cephalopod
to steal my three hearts.
I’d called it ‘Squid Goals’. I hoped it might be World Cephalopod Day. It wasn’t.
A few minutes later, Liz retweeted it. And then, a reply! ‘Thanks,’ it read. ‘I needed some nonsense today.’
I worked on my response to her until lunchtime. I was aiming for something that was simultaneously witty and matter-of-fact, as well as sophisticated and approachable. After an hour of deliberation, I settled on the rather more prosaic and insouciant, ‘no probs’. That appeared to draw a line under the whole matter – although not for the RSPCA, who tweeted me to ask for a photograph of ‘these so-called tentaclehooks’, as they sounded potentially harmful to squidlife.
Saturday April 7th
There was another resounding victory for Dylan’s football team today. In his pre-match team-talk, I heard him tell his teammates that they needed to express themselves more because ‘nothing is art if it does not come from nature’.
On the long walk home, I asked him whether he’d come up with that himself or if it was another one of Stuart’s. He looked at me disappointedly. ‘I came across it in Barcelona,’ he said. ‘It’s Gaudí.’ I nodded sagely. He was manager between Rijkaard and Guardiola, I think.
When we got back, Dylan declared it was time for Geography revision. I volunteered my services. While he was getting his nose into textbooks full of glaciers, oxbow lakes, cumulonimbi, drumlins, and scree, I tried to help out by recreating the Burgess and Hoyt model of urban land use through the medium of Lego: with limited success, it must be said.
Sunday April 8th
Brazenly, I messaged Liz on Twitter to invite her on the Poets on the Western Front trip. To my delight, she responded almost instantly, saying that she’d love to come.
It feels like I’ve crossed a line, jumped over the barbed wire and exposed myself in No Man’s Land, and now there are only two courses of action open to me: stand here and wait for annihilation, or plough on and hope to storm her trenches.
Monday April 9th
Cell
There was a time when I was an office somebody; if not one of the big enchiladas, then at least a small- to medium-sized quesadilla. My officle was envied by others for its desirable fenestered location. I had the run of the second-floor, east-side colour printer. It was widely rumoured that I had the ear of Janice.
Quite how it’s come to this, I don’t know. Only hammock tasks come my way these days: low-level planning, proofreading, endless spreadsheet data-entry. Unable to find anything to put on the front burner, I spend my time multi-slacking and clock-sucking. While storm clouds gather in frosted meeting rooms, I feel myself slowly fading into jobsolescence.
Tuesday April 10th
The April issue of Well Versed – The Quarterly Magazine for the Discriminating Poet arrived today, announcing itself with a papery thump on the doormat. Once more my poem has failed to be shortlisted. Mercifully, I noted that neither had Toby Salt’s. On closer inspection, I discovered that this was because he was one of the judges.
He’d described the winning poem as a ‘fascinating experiment at the bleeding interface of literature and technology’. It was called ‘The Alan Turing Prize for Poetry’ and had been written by a computer science Ph.D. student. The first half had been written by the student himself, who finds himself in a poetry competition with a ‘poetry bot’:
The Poet
The whole idea is absurd. It cannot feel
the rightness or wrongness of words
like I, nor describe the moon which hangs
in the changing night sky
as a pancake
as a bruised knee
as a scraped plate.
Reader, such things are innate, arrive in the brain
unbidden, uncaptured by an algorithm,
irreducible to formula, not a racket of tuneless words
played out by some school-hall orchestra
without its dear conductor. Each word in this poem
has been carefully deliberated, hard won,
is not simply one of the many permutations
which might make up a poem.
That’s not the same as poetry, clearly.
It’s no contest really.
The second half was written by the poetry bot and had been generated by a computer programme, featuring a complex set of algorithms which could take apart any given section of text and rewrite it as poetry. It rehashed all the words from the first piece:
The Poetry Bot
A poem is like the tuneless night,
hard-bruised by the rightness
of an uncaptured algorithm
which hangs simply in the sky,
as irreducible as a plate in a school-hall,
or one
clearly scraped knee.
A poem is absurd, a pancake formula
to describe the many permutations
of the moon, not deliberated in the brain
by a carefully changing orchestra;
its has-been conductor cannot make up words.
As such, each word is played out whole,
unbidden, not without racket,
nor wrongness. Words arrive;
are innate things which feel (as some might not!).
That’s it. No, really – it’s the same idea.
Of the poetry contest?
This, dear reader, I won.
Toby Salt has described it as the ‘next great development in poetical form, in which we move away from our reliance on the tired tropes of old.’
Some days I feel like a tired trope of old. And I’m utterly sick of Toby Salt’s bleeding interface.
Wednesday April 11th
Staying late to finish my lunchtime sudoku, I told Tomas about the competition-winning computer-generated poem while he was cleaning my officle. He became very animated at the mention of this topic.
‘But this is inevitable! As Wittgenstein would have us believe, the limits of our language are the limits of our world! If we can harness technology to broaden the lexicon of language, how might we reconstruct our words! Just imagine what might be achieved and the things that we might know of ourselves!’ he cried before wiping my keyboard clean of its daily plaque.
There are days when it feels as if everyone is cleverer than me.
Thursday April 12
As if Toby Salt lording it as Judge and Jury wasn’t enough, flicking through my copy of Well Versed, I also encountered an article written by him, entitled ‘How I write’:
I rise by six and head outside for thirty minutes of tai chi under the cherry tree. Once I feel my surge of qi, I head back in to prepare half a grapefruit for breakfast while listening to BBC Radio 3: news and pop music ruins everything. Suitably fuelled, I journey down the garden to my studio which lies secluded behind a magnificent oak tree. I walk inside this cedar-timbered, shingle-clad inner-city haven with its fully-stocked log store and wood-burning stove and sit down at my desk to wait for the magic to happen, having first poured myself a refreshing cup of tea. Lapsang souchong, I find, really helps to get my creative juices flowing.
Is it any wonder he goes around winning competitions and being invited to festivals and the like? If his shed was my shed, I suspect I’d have won the Nobel Prize for Literature by now.
Friday April 13th
Paraskevidekatriaphobia
is a fear of Friday the Thirteenth,
said the doctor, prescribing some pills,
writing the word underneath.
She looked at the note and fainted.
The only thing that made her feel ropier
was her hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.
Friday 13th might be unlucky for some but not for the Man at Number 29 who put out his recycling bags today, on the designated day for recycling. I saw him looking out through his bay window as they were picked up and carried off by the recycling truck. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him looking so calm and collected. Unlike Mrs McNulty, who always spends this day in absolute terror, possibly with good reason. Last year, she ended up in A&E, having slipped up on the acorn she’d been carrying around with her all day for good luck.
In other news, I began to read Wuthering Heights this evening. I’m on page 12 already. It’s rather moorish.
Saturday April 14th
Pipette Dream
He could gauze at her all day,
she was hot,
like a Bunsen burner
with its air hole fully open,
and he loved to watch the glint
of her conical flask
under the laboratory light.
Standing by the lab bench,
holding his own pipette,
he would dream of wild experiments,
but his tripod
remained unmounted
and there was no exchange
of tongs.
Dylan tells me that Stuart has been helping him with his GCSE revision and so, after football (another victory – ‘winning is a habit’), I nobly volunteered my own services. Just my luck, he took out his chemistry books. Chemistry was probably my worst subject at school; I used to live in dread of the double lesson every Wednesday morning, a situation not helped by an incident involving Nigel Thompson and a pinch clamp.
All this must have sunk deep into my subconscious because later I dreamt that I was back at school and Liz was my chemistry teacher. She leant over me at my workbench, wearing nothing but a lab coat, and told me that she needed to inspect my milky-white coagulate, I woke up on the sofa with a cry, flushed and flustered.
Sunday April 15th
The cat set out her somnolent stall today, putting her pegs determinedly in me, and making all practical tasks impossible beyond the reading and sending of tweets. It is National Cat Day, and I posted up a photo of her on Twitter, with the caption ‘My cat, asleep, in the eighth of her nine lives. Previous lives include Roman Centurion and Advisor to Cardinal Richelieu.’
Liz replied with a similar photo of her own cat, asleep, and a short poem:
In 1919,
plans for Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations were composed:
my cat dozed.
Liz was talking to me on Twitter! I found another photo of my sleeping cat. I sent it back with:
In 1789,
Louis XVI appraised the mob and realised his days were numbered:
my cat slumbered.
Liz responded once more with another picture and:
In 1533,
Thomas More refused the Oath and sadly paid the price:
my cat snoozed (and dreamt of mice).
We were having a banter! We were indulging in some actual bantering! The Oath of Succession was actually 1534 but I let that one go. I kept my next one brief in case Liz was getting bored:
In 1351,
the Black Death swept:
my cat slept.
In return, she revealed a respectable working knowledge of early cartographical history:
In 150,
Ptolemy did some geometry and the world got mapped:
my cat napped.
My reply to that one I thought rather witty, and I was a little disappointed when Liz didn’t single it out for particular praise:
In 64,
Rome burned. Nero fiddled. The citizens showed their ire.
My cat curled up by the fire.
Before Liz finished off the sequence with:
In 1323 BC,
my cat spent the year with both eyes firmly shut
then got buried with King Tut.
I have to go now, she wrote, but thanks for making my morning.
I stroked my cat some more. My lovely cat; she deserved it. Liz and I seem to have a lot of things in common: cats, poems, poems about cats . . . maybe other things, too. I wonder if she likes custard creams.
Monday April 16th
I know I should be working but there are far more interesting things to be doing on my phone. The list of untackled work tasks piles up gently and un-urgently and no one seems to mind. Instead there were more conversations to be had with Liz. It turns out that she’s a freelance copy-editor and proofreader; that probably explains why she has already corrected my grammar twice today.
I picked up the crossword for the first time in a while this evening. As is often the way, I got an answer almost instantly. 22 across:
CALLIPYGOUS (adj.): having beautiful buttocks.
Tuesday April 17th
A Modern Romance
We started out
by texting
got snapchatting
then the next thing
we were updating
Facebook pages
with ‘in a relationship’
statuses
swapping selfies
Spotify playlists
of our latest jam
Tumblr love notes
And Twitter hearts,
a shared Pinterest
in decorative arts.
We feel attuned,
in touch, complete,
one day
we even hope to meet.
Liz tells me that Wuthering Heights is one of her favourite books; she loves the wildness, darkness and windsweptness of it all. I told her how much I love it, too, as my copy, with its many pristine, unturned pages, gave me withering looks from my bedside table.
Wednesday April 18th
I have been thinking about how I might become a little more Heathcliff and a little less Brian.
It seems unlikely – given Liz’s description of him – that Heathcliff would be content to spend his days sitting in an officle, wrestling with Microsoft Excel. Although there are few opportunities for wildness and ruggedness at work, I did my best, rearranging my paper clips carefully into an unruly pile, scrunching up old memos and lobbing them at the wastepaper basket and signing off on my emails simply as ‘B’, with no preceding valedictions of ‘best wishes’ or ‘many thanks’ or anything.
I’ve also decided to stop shaving for a while.
Thursday April 19th
Diary of a Somebody Page 8