Thanks for all the comments about the poem!
And I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to read them and reflect. This little
genius of a machine sighed and almost gave up and I’ve had real difficulties
trying to get back on line! But, hopefully, the little things inside are
back to their magical normality again!
Anyway, the comments...
Yes, Gary, there’s quite a few words I would omit, too, if the poem wanted
to work with a different pace (and, so, assume a different voice). But I
enjoy the way city talk is faster, less considered, than the ways people
speak in (smaller) towns and in rural areas. I sense I wanted each line to
rattle through with an exuberance that helps to show it was a good night
out.
Any, yes, Michele, I enjoy the way Frank O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that”
poems work. His poetry has many fans (and almost as many imitators) in many
cities in the UK. But I agree that many attempts to copy his style and
emulate his energy often flounder. Myself I think it’s because one aspect of
his poetry that’s rarely recognised is that his most successful “Lunch
Poems” seem to have far more going on than appears on the surface. (The Day
Lady Died, for instance, is both working with issues of life and death and
is reversing how we usually think about time – it starts off in the future,
locates itself in the present, yet ends up in the past! Recognising how
important music and colour are in his poems are ways I sense they are so
subtly crafted. His appreciation of art seems to belong to his poems as well
– I sometimes sense he wrote in a similar way to how his friends painted. I
often wish he hadn’t explained that he’d hammer a couple of lines out on the
typewriter, then go out for lunch, then rattle a few more lines out. That
seems to infer a casualness about his writing!).
I’m also wondering why y think it’s a distant memory I’m talking through,
too! (Why can’t it be recent? Is it the reference to Bilko? Isn’t Bilko’s
repeated on the TV today? He is in the UK)
And I sense C.K. Williams style is so much more controlled than mine. I
remember his UK publisher once talking about how he insisted that his
long-lined poems had to be justified on the page (and how difficult that was
with particular type-faces/fonts. Every line had to appear with identical
lengths). I like his street-wise poems a lot – but find his psychological
ramblings seem too vague... (I would, however, have loved to hear him read –
it may have made me more sympathetic to much more of his writing - but I was
working away each time he came to read in my part of the UK!)
And thanks, Ryfkah! Yeh, I guess, even tho I’m working the poem with a
strong emphasis on “memory” as a source (whether it actually happened or not
doesn’t detract from the point that I hope it feels as if it happened!) I
enjoyed letting “imagination” do some work as well and so have the moon
being the only one using quotable speech (the rest of the poem works with
reported speech, or inferred speech).
And I’m glad, York, you think it may work well with people who don’t have
much of an appreciation of poetry... I remember a famous quote of a UK poet,
Adrian Mitchell, “Most people don’t think much about poetry because most
poetry doesn’t think much about people.” (Or something similar to that...).
I guess both poetry’s subject matter and people have to change before he can
be refuted. I’d love to know where the people you mention live and what they
make of it!
Bob



>From: Bob Cooper <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: What Made The Moon Whisper
>Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 23:07:54 +0000
>
>for C & C:
>N.B. The poem (despite what may get changed by the width of your screen) is
>in long lined quatrains! The phrase in *Italics* is denoted between
>asterix,
>i.e. *the phrase...*
>
>
>What Made The Moon Whisper
>
>
>This is the night for gazing at where the full moon is about to rise beyond
>Spittal Tongues
>and, because the 3.30 at Haydock was just as it should be, the pints are
>all
>on Joe Coral;
>the night for students, although well pissed, with loud accents and Casio
>watches, to be polite,
>for singing old Supreme songs in the gents while agreeing the barmaid looks
>like Debbie Harry,
>
>and this is when Chris will tell the stories again of how he appeared in a
>film with Ali McGraw,
>then how they shared vegi-burgers and diet-coke for lunch and talked of The
>Good Soldier Svejk
>while 6th Formers from the coast, with Lurex tights, large earrings and 10
>Bensons, turn away,
>shimmy handbags between their shoes and gaze at the tall guys in dark suits
>stood near them.
>
>This is the night for wailing along to Howlin Wolf, another last 80/-,
>feeling good and tall,
>for dancing with nurses half-way across Percy St., for giggling eating
>pizzas, for hopscotch,
>for whistling at policewomen, for acknowledging that Arsenal have a good
>team, for lying,
>then strolling home light-footed, where you’ll smile while I tell of most
>things that were funny,
>
>and later, after watching Bilko while eating toast, and laughing so much
>there’s no need for sex,
>the air is still warm when the huge moon hides its face at 3 o’clock and I
>stagger to the bowl
>then it reappears politely when I get up off my knees and whispers when I
>sway back to bed,
>*It’s all right, I understand, it’s OK.*  And as I pull up the duvet I
>believe in that kindness and sleep.
>
>
>
>Bob Cooper
>
>
>(Footnotes, perhaps for US and Australian readers...)
>Haydock is a Racecourse
>Joe Coral's is a chain of Betting Shops
>Bensons are cigarettes (Bensons & Hedges)
>80/-  (or "eighty shilling" is the name of a draught beer, which in
>Scotland
>can also be called "80 bob" or, I believe, "heavy.")
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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