Poetry Forum

My rancid flat/squat overlooks King Street, which for those not familiar with London is the main thoroughfare running between Westminster and the Benson & Hedges-chic pramlands of the Southwest. A lot of political marches go up there: hippy-chic wannabes, housewives and 15-year old students bunking school, coming together to shout slogans about issues far beyond the grasp of their limited education. Kneejerk, anti-what-is-happening reactions to the identifiable media issues of the day: endlessly cyclical, anti-Bush, anti-Blair, pro-nice over-general values.

Me? I’m past that. I started off taking the politicians’ words, negating them and sticking it on a banner. But I’m past that now. The words on their posters and stickers aren’t even meaningful in the language I think in. It’s all so much gibberish, because now I have something different.

It’s something brooding, something 'perverse' in the most technically correct sense of the word, and it’s ready to slip out of my brown-walled, un-redecorated yuppie cage and wash into the streets like a tidal wave of destruction/reconstruction.

Shit, what am I rambling about? This is what 48 hours by yourself will do to your mind. First the paranoid delusions, laying down the floor under the windowsill so that only a police helicopter at just the right angle could pick you out from the green-black carpet thick with dirt and spilt booze. Then the frantic need for stimulation drives you out of your hiding place and to the desk to bang two grams of speed, but that just keeps you from the comfort of sleep and before long it’s delusions of grandeur.

Someone once mentioned their mundane dreams of being a published author to me and then huffed, “hah, delusions of grandeur!” This morning I was redesigning the world in my image through the power of word-salad and total mental reorganisation. How’s that for grandeur?

I hallucinate. The world twists round in front of me. I say in front of me, but actually it’s inside of me. The whole fabric of the world, disconnecting from its canvass and spinning into itself with sickening speed until it finally resolves itself in some disgusting, vomit-pool of disconnected dots of sound and colours. But I recognise the world in it, and I recognise myself in it, and see that the synthesis is creation. These are my prouder moments.

Yes, these are exceptionally proud moments... the kind of buzz you can’t get from shopping or sex or cocaine. Yeah, madness has its downsides… mainly the loneliness. Even if someone wanted to talk to me, short of them applying a psychic mindmelt, their attempts at communication would be in vain. But a bit of insanity stirs the soul into a storm, and I enjoy the adrenaline of sitting at the top of that cyclone. Ideally, you want the whole world to be mad, so we can all be weird bastards together, wandering around the streets, bumping into eachother, grinding our teeth, rubbing our genitals…

Hi TDOTM

Thanks for doing some crits in this (slow moving) forum.

I quite enjoyed this. The first person viewpoint works well for getting inside the head of your drug affected (?) character. However, the piece does have a rather static, self-absorbed feel to it.

If you intend to continue this, I really feel that you need to introduce some kind of plot. (Beckett could do first-person-nothing-happens - but then his vision of the world was rather unique.)

It would be interesting to see how your character would react if he were forced into contact with some of the Westminster protestors who he despises.

Cheers
Cam

Yeah, well it's really useful and nice to have a place like this. I don't really have much idea how to write at the moment, so it's good to have somewhere to be able to exhibit peices without fear of extremely harsh criticism or silly loved-up pretense. The atmosphere on this site is probably just about right for a person like me, so it's a pleasure to post here.

... The novel train is good too.

It's a pity I have little to offer in the way of actual constructive criticism, but at least I have my tastes and modes.


Hah, the character is a drug user, yes, but I hadn't decided if he's actually mentally damaged most prominently from the substance abuse or inborn insanity. It didn't seem to matter at the time. Anyway, some of it is obviously imagined, some of it is descriptions of various drug experiences I've had: particularly those that actually border on insanity, like ones that involved not sleeping for a long time after sobering up (and do pardon me if I'm not to mention such things here. I've yet to see any guidance on the issue).

It's indeed self-absorbed, but I'm afraid I'm a self-absorbed person (notice present massive post) in many ways, so perhaps it's unavoidably so.

And yes, it's extremely static. I was just playing around really, BUT it was meant to sound like more of a rant than an actual story or anything. And it remains uneditted (which is where this board comes in). The idea of plots intimidates me, but I did (afterwards) begin writing another part to the story, where this first, irratic, static part was replaced by a third-person narrative. It begins...


God, it was all a dream. I half-woke up the sound of some broken, disharmonious sounds that fell through my ear like so many hobbling cripples and landed in a pile of disjointed ideas in my brain. Finally they organised themselves into a recognisable tune and I realised that I was up. It was a dream.

I tried to reflect on the phantasm, but the memories were already slipping my consciousness, and I recognised that they would probably never be recovered, so I gave up trying to hold on to the remaining ones and hobbled out of bed. Reaching down the cheap plastic cooler on my small bedroom’s floor, I plucked a can of coke out, tapped the top and opened it right into my throat. A morning ritual.

My eyes pinged from the first caffeine rushes and I was ready for the day ahead. The phone call that had woken me was from Gilbert, a black grimey on the other side of Wondsteam I regularly hook up with green. Of course I have no alarms set on my phone: I’m a weed-dealer, one of the last types of free spirits this city is graced with, bar all those work-dodging students living on their comfy loans.

I put on a brown leather jacket and a pair of converse shoes and stepped into the street in the jeans I’d worn to bed. Gil wanted his standard: two ounces for a day of dealing, and it was only a fifteen minutes walk to his house, so I decided to skip the bus. Being a man of leisure, I took a bit of time to admire the early afternoon weather; the bracing-but-not-uncomfortable October chill, the drying pools of rain from the night before…

I had a story in mind, in which the narrator goes to the dealer's house, emerges, is arrested for some sort of crime he hasn't committed, suffers these recurring dreams in the same abstract-but-ever-so-slightly-more-revealing ways, till... he finally comes to an emotional realisation that he did in fact commit the crime in some sort of Jeckle and Hyde-like frenzy...

... but obviously I haven't got round to that. And most of me doubts I ever will.


Two last things...

1. I've heard a lot about Beckett here. Any recommendations? I'm quite a good reader, ready to accept any challenges and all that, so anything will do.

2. Do you have any technical hints on how I could improve my use of language? Make it a bit more arresting or sensuous or... well, better.

Anyway, enough of this self-indulgently long post. Thank you for your comments and positive words. They are obviously of great value to me.



P.S. Pardon the recurring substance-talk, by the way. It was just a sort of mood I found myself in when writing the above passages.

Beckett's trilogy is a cracker. It consists of:

1) Malloy
2) Malone Dies
3) The Unnamable

Its a gradual deterioration - until the last book is just a man with no name who sits in a chair and does nothing.

Yes, go for the visit to the drug dealer or a bust by the Nark Squad - or anything which will provide a bit of action/development. (Have you read The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics? Same territory.)

Here are some handy hints:

http://poetsgraves.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3053

As for use of language, you really need to find your own sound. That's what it's all about really. Style is the man!
Keep posting.
Cam

Indeed, I want to learn to write with different styles. Use of language is so much more important than any other element of writing, it would seem.

I'll get some Beckett after I've finished my current book (which is Crime and Punishment... so that may take a bit).

I would have enjoyed further reading/descriptions of this fall into insanity. The description of the ward and its patients. Their mental state too. The political illustration too could have been expanded on one certain instance.

There are more comments but not willing to post them at this tiring moment.

TilDeathOverTakesMe has written a first draft off the top of his head which is excellent. It is concise and original although the subject matter will not be to everyone’s light reading taste nevertheless it is a real modern day story that is relevant today’s society. He writes in the perfect tense, and that is unusual but here it is rather interesting. If one wanted to experience misery and sordid degradation without suffering this is the way to do it, by reading about it.

Sugestions:

‘My rancid flat/squat’, suggest squat would be better on its own, you can add flat later for clarity. Or you could try squatted flat but that is too much effort.
‘Kneejerk’ may be better as knee-jerk.
I liked the use of ‘pramlands,’ never heard it used before, liked it. Maybe pram-lands would be better.

The first paragraph was an excellent lead-in paragraph, concise and gave exactly the right mood to the piece. We kind of guess the rant to come.

I liked ‘pro-nice over-general values.’ Thought it was great, struck a cord with me, very good.

The second paragraph gets more personal and indicates a change in the mood and the direction.

I don’t know why ‘perverse’ is in quotes in the third paragraph, seems superfluous to me. I am using quotes and italics to show that it’s your writing and that I am commenting on it.

Suggest ‘un-redecorated’ is weak, there are many more words better suited to describe a washed-out run-down dump.

Surely, you mean former yuppie dump rather than ‘yuppie’. Your character is downwardly mobile to say the least.

I don’t like the use of an oblique lines here, it’s more for technical descriptions in my opinion, suggest you use ‘and’ instead of ‘/’

You are tending to use sound bites rather than clichés here: ‘most technically correct sense’ and you are using them in the wrong way. You are not taking technically at all, you are writing an auto biography of a drug user. Other than that, the third paragraph is a masterpiece of original writing, vivid, raw and devoid of sloppiness, in short it does the job and leads onto the new thoughts in paragraph 4.

The following paragraphs are excellent writing, there are some trivial commas needed in places , if you use WORD it will suggest the proper places for you, no big thingie. Although I shrank from the utter depravity of the character and his situation, not to mention his mind set it was excellent writing about a difficult subject, one can imagine the writer is writing from experience but that need not be the case and we certainly don’t wish to pry further.

One words jarred in particular, ‘psychic’, I would have though psychiatric would be the word you were looking for, after all it is about madness not spirituality. But ‘mindmelt’ was excellent, I’ve never seen it used before although it would be better as mind-melt.

If I say any more, I will be repeating myself, but it was good writing, very good indeed, about an unsavoury and depressing subject. I found humour in it and I believe the author intended some black humour. It was a refreshing read although not normally my cup-of-tea.

Regards

IoanSant