Читать книгу The Incomplete Tim Key - Tim Key - Страница 12

INTRODUCTION

If you’ve ever put together an anthology of your poems, you’ll know that one of the main things that comes up in meetings and emails is this phrase: ‘Which poems will go into the anthology, anyway?’

That was certainly my experience. From the outset there were long discussions as to which of my poems should go into this book. And, more sadly, which shouldn’t.

I should clarify, nice and early, that the problem with me has never been that it is difficult to scratch together ‘enough’ poems. No, quite the reverse. When it comes to quantity, I have an embarrassment of riches. In fact, I’ve heard it argued that I do better for quantity than I do for quality. Who knows? May be a grain of truth in that. I think there’s a debate to be had, though. One thing that is beyond question is this: I’ve got over 2,000 of the sods. And in other news, I’ve never had any complaints about the quality of any of them.

So where do you start? I remember at the first full English breakfast I had with Nick – the editor of the original hardback, way back in 2011 – he arrived armed with a wad of my poems. I remember him dealing them onto the table and saying words to the effect of ‘These: I like.’ I was piercing my fried egg with the corner of my fried bread at the time and barely concentrating on his activities, but that I do remember. These poems spread across the red and white chequered tablecloth, Nick prodding them with a teaspoon. One after another he would poke one and say, ‘This one: I like.’ I remember sipping my Fanta and thinking, ‘So what? Me too.’

The hammer blow came a couple of minutes later when he finished his prodding. He shuffled the poems back up into a wad again and bunged them down next to my bowl of beans. There must have been about thirty of the bastards. ‘The question is,’ he said earnestly, ‘where are we getting the rest from?’ I remember nodding as I folded some bread and butter round a hash brown and spooned on some juice that had apparently sweated out of the mushrooms. I remember smiling, too, and leaning right across our plates, right into his face. ‘From the same Word document you printed these out from, matey,’ I said. And I slotted the hash into my mouth and I leant way back in my chair.

He seemed like he wanted to be the next person to speak, but I held a sausage up to his mouth to shush him. ‘I’ll just choose the best three hundred,’ I continued. He started his next sentence with ‘But in terms of quality …’, but I shut him off; changed the subject to a discussion of where he thought the waiter was from. Nick was silent for a spell, but then adapted to our new topic, suggested maybe Scotland. And the question of ‘which poems’ remained in my court for the remainder of our relationship.

When I got home I started to pore through my poems. It’s difficult to select three hundred poems when you have such an intimidating stack. I know it’s a cliché, but they are all my babies. I write them all. I know that sounds unbelievable when you consider the standard and wealth of them, but it’s true. Of course I’ve considered farming them out. Hiring some whizz kid PA to squat at my desk, rattling them off from dawn till dusk, but that’s just not how this game works. Ask any poet and they’ll tell you the same thing: it’s important you have a stake in all your poems. A feeling of ownership. So I write them. And I become very attached to them. And so to just cast a thousand, fifteen hundred, more to one side – well, it’s tough. But that was the task, and so I necked maybe a quart of gin and I started hurling clumps of my poems over my head. Huge fistfuls of the sods.

It’s tough seeing them go, of course it is. Each poem takes time to conceive, to develop. I nurture them from acorn to oak, each and every one of them. I’ve got a whole chapter about the grim realities of drafting and redrafting the little urchins in this very book. If you think a poem can just be ‘spunked out’, or whatever the phrase it is you’re using, then you’re living in cloud cuckoo land, you really are. I happen to have an enormous amount of respect for my readership and I know that they know the difference between a poem that’s been dashed off in a second and one that’s had a few weeks of care and attention lavished upon it.

And so I just shut my eyes and flung out as many as I could bear. Carnage.

Those that were left I unfolded, ironed, stuck together into sheets, scanned and emailed to Nick. And it is those three hundred that make up this book. Three hundred out of two thousand. The cream. Or, more accurately, some of the cream. Dunked into chapters and positioned pleasingly on the page. They are just the tip, of course, of my poetry iceberg. But though I’ve sacrificed many in the purge, still enough remain. Or as Nick used to say, sometimes smiling, other times quite solemnly: ‘More than enough.’