A life spent working in the lowest form of showbusiness that is poetry: I
learnt, after reading Anthony Cronin's Dead As Doornails memoir, of life in
the pub with Behan, O'Brien and Kavanagh - can always be rendered
comedically in prose.
That spat, for me, was just an excuse to get my name about by causing a bit
of bother. The online writer who doesn't submit any work anywhere (after
getting in ten or so rags, i just stopped sending out because i thought it
was all a game really) can be free to follow their nose and mould ourself
into whatever it is we will become, and now my name is known by enough
people in po-biz, for me to feel comfortable with this level of celebrity.
My learning has been one long spam to coherency and after 10,000 hours
actual writing, coinciding with reading Pliny younger, the underlying
syntactic knowledge of writing being, essentially, a four beat system - came.
We have a comma, the quarter beat; semi-colon is a half beat: three quarter
beat colon and the period a full stop. With dashes, we have five tools in
the kit-box with which to lay down the four by four track on which our
thoughts run.
That's it, the whole gig.
I had often read and heard that, due to its syntax and grammar, Latin is the
perfect language for laying out thoughts in a clear, conscise and coherent
order, and on reading Pliny, this is self evident. Until then, it felt like
my apprenticeship in Letters was a bit like being an apprentice bricklayer
being taught through a solely verbal medium.
Imagine, a trainee brickie: you’re in a room and the tutor is telling you
how to build a wall, totally verbally, without any visual instruction,
videos or practical how-to. Reading Pliny was like going on-site and seeing
it being done.
That was a few months ago, and a big penny dropped/light came on, and I
found that I became more interested in nailing the copy perfectly, than
hitting send - which previously was the case. Training over. A fully
(un)ticketed bluffer at doctorate level, with an 'original contribution to
knowledge' really, perhaps?
If not, so what? I can now blather all day long to my hearts content, online
bugging people by being myself and spreading the faery musk amongst those
who wanna be a fan - potentially, enough from the six billion, nine hundred
and ninety nine million six hundred thousand people who are not in the same
game of being a poet - to make a few quid.
ha ha ha.
love and peace Jeff. happy spamming.
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