New Stuff 1

Traüme


Surprised how slim you looked, how young,
red cotton briefs that made you look like Sybil Starr,
my room the way it was, the bed half-broken.
I lay, my body rhymed, at last, with yours,

though clothed: the same smooth legs,
same swelling breasts, the same receiving void
between the legs, the origin of worlds,
here, at the end, yours given, mine achieved.

I felt you shaking in my sleep and cried
then, as you came around, I wiped my eyes.
You looked at me and barely said it’s time.
All I could say, at last your daughter, was goodbye.

*    *    *

The musician Paul Heaton fell out with pro-Labour pop music initiative Red Wedge when they refused to endorse his demand that the British music industry be nationalised. I kind of have the same feeling about poetry: I think the government should pay all poets a modest living wage as a kind of insurance policy for the spiritual welfare of the nation. Partly this is because I genuinely feel it would do some good, but partly this is because, if I was paid to be a poet, then after writing poems like this one I could take some flexitime, go home and nurse myself with comfort food and feelgood movies for the rest of the day, instead of having to go into my quote unquote 'real' job and toil in the macro-geometry of the corporate Archon for seven hours after having to confront something literally traumatic.

Traume is German for 'dream', and this poem is based on a particularly heartbreaking dream I had this morning. In the dream, I was a girl, meaning, I guess, that I'd transitioned fully. The woman lying in my old bed with me was my mother and, just so you have all the facts in before you page Dr Freud, she was dying. It was a horrible dream, and what gave it a particular horror was the thought that here I was, finally a real girl, as it were, but all I got to say was goodbye, as the final line has it. Fucking heartrending.

So the logical thing to do with that as a poet is write something based on it. Writing as magic: binding the demon, making something beautiful out of the pain so it works for you instead of against you. Whatever. This is my effort at such. I'm not entirely happy with it ('swelling' breasts, particularly), and would welcome suggestions for improvement.

(As to explaining who Sybil Starr is, I did attempt a rather long explanation but it quickly got off-topic and turned [as most conversations with me generally will] into a vituperative attack on the scientific validity of the theories of Sigmund Freud. Suffice to say that she's the kind of girl who'd be very popular with the narratrix of NSFW, though, if you do intend to google her, you should be aware that quite a lot of Ms Starr's work is itself NSFW. I'm not really sure how an allusion to a female wrestler called Sybil, of all things, wound up working its way into such an already strange dream, but there it is, as Francis Bacon used to say. Odd place, the subconscious.)

(On a related note, the phrase 'the origin of worlds' is, of course, a reference to this similarly NSFW piece by Gustave Courbet.)

Gonna Be Some Changes...

I'm thinking of making a couple of alterations to this li'l old blog.

First of all, the title. The Fishblog originated as basically a review blog, a place where I could sharpen my critical muscles by writing (often essay-length) reviews of whatever books, film, music or other media had in some way got my dander up in any particular week. It's a cliche (and often untrue) that critics tend to be people who can't write themselves, but I admit in my case that that was part of the reason for setting up this blog: I was, at the time, lacking confidence in my original work, so decided to indulge myself in a spot of criticism to keep my hand in, so to speak, and to stop my aesthetic senses getting dull.

However, having allowed myself a space in which to express myself, I quickly reverted to my default state of using this opportunity to harangue the passerby. Very soon the idea that this was solely a review blog, or even a review blog at all, was abandoned, and I began using it to unburden myself of my opinions on the media, the BNP, gender issues, publishing, bookselling, gender issues, the problems of managerialism, kyriarchy, gender issues and why you shouldn't start fights with Tori Amos fans. I may also have written one or two posts about gender issues as well.

At the same time, largely following the senses-shattering announcement that I'd decided to cancel what was to be my second collection of poems, something seemed to free up in my writing and I found poems coming to me again, I started writing poetry again in earnest, I started performing again and I essentially got better in both senses of the word: I recovered from my writers' block, and I started writing better work than before. So part of the point of the blog became promoting my writing and the performances I was doing, especially around the time of my fourth plinth appearance and the recent Newcastle Human Rights Festival gig.

At some point during all of this gubbins, I jettisoned the name 'To Praise and Blame' and rechristened this as The Somewhat New and Allegedly Improved Fishblog, a title which is increasingly redundant really. I still think the blog has improved - and, while I still only have a small number of followers compared to the juggernauts of the blog world, the fact that that number has risen exponentially since this site stopped being a review blog is proof of that - but it's no longer really even somewhat new. So, I'm thinking we need a new title. This is where you come in.

If you're reading this, you've probably read this blog before. If someone asked you why you read it, you could probably sum it up for them in a sentence. You could tell them what interested you about the blog in the first place, what it is that makes it unique, and why you keep coming back. So - with all those things in mind - if you had the responsibility of thinking up a new title for this blog, one that reflects all of those things - what would you call it?

Answers on a metaphorical postcard please, either in the comments field below or via my Twitter or Facebook pages if you want. Best suggestion will be chosen as the new title for the blog. Get thinking!