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***This is the forty-forth in a never-ending series
called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC)
focuses on one specific poem and how the poet wrote that specific poem.
All BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links are at the end of this
piece.
#44 Backstory of the
Poem
“This poem is too neat”
by Jonathan P Taylor
Can you go through the
step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first
conceived in your brain until final form?
Clearly, very earliest
memories are a treasure trove for writers, as they are for psychologists – and
for similar reasons. I’d been thinking for a long while about a poem about one
of my earliest memories – going to the art deco swimming pool in Trentham
Gardens (Above Right: Fair Use), near our family home in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, in the hot summer of 1976
and 1977 (see http://trentham-nostalgia.tripod.com/). I didn’t realise the memory was
so early in my life, until I found out that the pool was closed far sooner than
I’d thought. It was closed in 1977 (I think), because of subsidence: Stoke is
riddled with coal mines, and the pool was closed because of cracks appearing in
it. Afterwards, we used to glimpse the dilapidated, decaying, almost ghostly
pool as it was left to rot, gradually reclaimed by nature.
We
loved the lido – but I must have been tiny, and can barely remember anything
about it, apart from being surrounded by mummies’ legs in the training pool,
and not being able to work out which pair of legs belonged to my mummy. Then I
remember climbing back into our car, shivering, and my father saying he (and,
for that matter, the rest of us too) would get pneumonia if we stayed out any
longer. It’s so strange, almost uncanny, that this is among my first memories,
given that – as the poem says – it was pneumonia which killed him in the end. (Left - Jonathan's parents in 1968. Copyright permission granted by Jonathan P Taylor for this CRC Blog Post Only)
I
felt compelled to write about that horrible coincidence – if it is a
coincidence, and not some peculiar kind of retrospective revision on the part
of my memory, or even (if we’re going to get mystical) some kind of pre-vision
or prophecy. But in writing about it, the circularity of it felt forced – one
of those moments where reality seems unbelievable, even though it is true. So
my initial drafts of the poem just felt forced – ‘too neat.’ I put it to one
side, and only returned to the idea a lot later, when I realised that the
‘neatness’ of the memory was precisely the point. The memory really is too
(painfully) neat, ‘too pat,’ and that was what the poem should be about – the
way that reality, like poetic form, seems to trap us sometimes in these
circular histories, recurring images, painful repetition compulsions. I
realised that the poem should draw attention to itself, to its own form,
precisely because that’s what history often does. It’s a very common aesthetic
trick in poems, essays, journalistic articles, stories, memoirs, pieces of
music, to circle back to an opening image at the end; but maybe this common
cyclical form in art reflects what happens in life, too. (Right: Jonathan's father in 1969. Copyright permission granted by Jonathan P. Taylor for this CRC Blog Post Only) 
Where were you when you
started to actually write the poem? And
please describe the place in great detail.
I’d tried for a long time to write about this
moment in my life before – so some of it was ‘written’ in my head while doing
other things (e.g. driving, making tea, having a bath). But primarily I write
in a very unglamorous location: the end of the sofa, with a laptop, often with
our twins playing round me or watching TV. I’m not precious about writing – I
don’t need silence or any particular place – I just write when I get the
chance, wherever I get the chance. It doesn’t matter if there are My Little
Ponies surrounding me, or a loud cartoon on the TV. You learn to filter certain
things out when you’ve got twins, I suppose: I’ve never had a problem
concentrating, perhaps because I love writing so much. (Left: Jonathan's writing space with his daughter Miranda's turtle on the keyboard. Copyright permission granted by Jonathan P Taylor for this CRC Blog Post Only)
What month and year did
you start writing this poem? I feel that most poems are
squirreling away in the dark until they emerge into full daylight – that is,
the starting-point for most poems is a bit invisible, just as you don’t
necessarily remember the beginnings of dreams. So I wanted to write something
about this earliest memory for many years, and I know I made notes about the
old lido when I was writing my memoir about my father, Take Me Home (Granta, 2007). I don’t have those notes any more, and
was thinking (or dreaming) much more in prose back then. But no doubt the ideas
fed into the poem. I actually put the words on paper (or, rather, on a laptop)
in late 2015, I think, and then messed with them for a few weeks and months
(alongside various other pieces I was working on). My father died in 2001, but
grief doesn’t end – it just morphs, mutates, assumes new images; and fourteen
years after his death, I found myself writing about it again in various forms. 
How many drafts of this
poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph
of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?)
I have no idea! I
don’t suppose I really do separate drafts: I just keep editing a poem,
reshaping it, experimenting with it over time, in a fluid way. Perhaps part of
the reason for this is that I write a lot on screen these days – so editing can
be continual. I’d love to be able to share a photo of a rough draft with pen
markings – but I’ve lost my notebook. Perhaps the twins have stolen my notebook
to draw bunnies and ponies on. (Jonathan with his twin daughters in February 2017. Copyright permission granted by Jonathan P Taylor for this CRC Blog Post Only)
Were there any lines in
any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? I remember trying to describe the
beautiful art deco lido more in earlier drafts. But then I realised that,
really, I was just working from photos of it – my own memory was much more
fragmentary, much more pointillistic. I wanted to reflect this in the poem.
After all, the poem is partly about the structure of memory, so it needs to be
true to how I remembered things – not to external photos, or nostalgic websites. (Right: 1960s photo of children at Trentham Gardens art deco lido. Fair Use)
What do you want readers
of this poem to take from this poem? That’s a difficult question: a poem
should, by definition, be open-ended, allow a reader to inhabit it, find
themselves in it, find their own resonances and echoes within it. Clearly, the
poem is very personal to me – but, as I realised when I was writing the memoir
many years ago, there has to be something underlying the personal which
connects with readers. This can be obvious, on the surface (as in “ooh, that
very same thing happened to me”), or it can be on a much more profound,
emotional, psychological or even unconscious level. No-one’s presumably going
to recognise what happens in the poem on the obvious level of “ooh, that very
same thing happened to me”; but perhaps there’s something here about family,
loss, grief, memory, a terrible (and retrospective) illusion of predestination
or determinism, which might, on some level, chime with others. It wouldn’t be
for me to pre-empt that as a writer, though – it’s no doubt up to the reader. (Left: Jonathan in April of 2017. Copyright permission granted by Jonathan P Taylor for this CRC Blog Post Only)
The
point is, I think, that all writing – and particularly memoiristic writing – is
structured around both sameness and difference, convergence and divergence,
recognition and defamiliarisation. In other words, all writing – and, as I say,
particularly autobiographical and biographical writing – moves about on a
spectrum between readerly identification and its opposite. If a poem or work of
autobiography entirely mirrored the reader’s experiences or emotions, the
reader would become bored; if the work had no point of contact at any level
with the reader’s experiences or emotions, it would seem alien, bewildering. So
a piece of writing needs both.
Which part of the poem
was the most emotional of you to write and why? All of it – but I wanted it to be very direct and
harsh when it comes to my father’s death (‘many years
later he did get it and died’), to communicate some idea of the shocking
finality of that moment. And after all, the poem is about destiny or fate (or
at least, the retrospective illusion of these things), and how harsh and
painful that sense of circularity can feel. (Left: Jonathan's father in the 1990s. Copyright permission granted by Jonathan P Taylor for this CRC Blog Post Only)
Has this poem been
published before? And if so where? It’s been published in my new collection, Cassandra Complex (Shoestring, 2018),
and also in Clear Poetry in 2016: https://clearpoetry.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/jonathan-taylor-three-poems/
This poem is too neat
The end of this poem will be too neat, too
pat.
It will do that circular thing of coming back
to an image or memory at the start, of
connecting
something very early with something sad
years later.
The start of the poem will describe
my very first memory of leaving the outdoor
Art Deco lido in Trentham Gardens
which was full of dozens of mummies’ bare legs
and was apparently closed when I was four.
I recall all of us shivering in towels in the
car
and asking my father what pneumonia was
because he’d told us he’d get it if we didn’t
leave right away. He explained what it was
and many years later he did get it and died.
I told you the end of this poem would be too
neat,
too pat, as if a poem can lock you into a
pattern
and there’s no getting out of it.
Jonathan Taylor is an
author, editor, lecturer and critic. His books include the poetry collection Cassandra Complex (Shoestring, 2018),
the memoir Take Me Home (Granta,
2007), and the novel Melissa (Salt,
2015). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester in
the UK. (Left: Copyright permission granted by Jonathan P Taylor for this CRC Blog Post Only)
Originally from Stoke-on-Trent, he now lives in Leicestershire with his
wife, the poet Maria Taylor, and their twin daughters, Miranda and Rosalind.
Jt265@le.ac.uk or crystalclearjt@hotmail.co.uk (Right: Jonathan and wife Maria in July of 2018. Copyright permission granted by Jonathan P Taylor for this CRC Blog Post Only)
BACKSTORY OF THE POEM
LINKS
001 December 29, 2017
Margo
Berdeshevksy’s “12-24”
002 January 08, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher’s “82 Miles From the Beach, We Order The Lobster At Clear Lake
Café”
003 January 12, 2018
Barbara
Crooker’s “Orange”
004 January 22, 2018
Sonia
Saikaley’s “Modern Matsushima”
005 January 29, 2018
Ellen
Foos’s “Side Yard”
006 February 03, 2018
Susan
Sundwall’s “The Ringmaster”
007 February 09, 2018
Leslea
Newman’s “That Night”
008 February 17, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher “June Fairchild Isn’t Dead”
009 February 24, 2018
Charles
Clifford Brooks III “The Gift of the Year With Granny”
010 March 03, 2018
Scott
Thomas Outlar’s “The Natural Reflection of Your Palms”
011 March 10, 2018
Anya
Francesca Jenkins’s “After Diane Beatty’s Photograph “History Abandoned”
012 March 17, 2018
Angela
Narciso Torres’s “What I Learned This Week”
013 March 24, 2018
Jan
Steckel’s “Holiday On ICE”
014 March 31, 2018
Ibrahim
Honjo’s “Colors”
015 April 14, 2018
Marilyn
Kallett’s “Ode to Disappointment”
016 April 27, 2018
Beth
Copeland’s “Reliquary”
017 May 12, 2018
Marlon
L Fick’s “The Swallows of Barcelona”
018 May 25, 2018
Juliet
Cook’s “ARTERIAL DISCOMBOBULATION”
019 June 09, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher’s “Stiletto Killer. . . A Surmise”
020 June 16, 2018
Charles
Rammelkamp’s “At Last I Can Start Suffering”
021 July 05, 2018
Marla
Shaw O’Neill’s “Wind Chimes”
022 July 13, 2018
Julia Gordon-Bramer’s
“Studying Ariel”
023 July 20, 2018
Bill Yarrow’s “Jesus
Zombie”
024 July 27, 2018
Telaina Eriksen’s “Brag
2016”
025 August 01, 2018
Seth Berg’s “It is only
Yourself that Bends – so Wake up!”
026 August 07, 2018
David Herrle’s “Devil In
the Details”
027 August 13, 2018
Gloria Mindock’s “Carmen
Polo, Lady Necklaces, 2017”
028 August 21, 2018
Connie Post’s “Two
Deaths”
029 August 30, 2018
Mary Harwell Sayler’s
“Faces in a Crowd”
030 September 16, 2018
Larry Jaffe’s “The
Risking Point”
031 September 24,
2018
Mark Lee Webb’s “After
We Drove”
032 October 04, 2018
Melissa Studdard’s
“Astral”
033 October 13, 2018
Robert Craven’s “I Have
A Bass Guitar Called Vanessa”
034 October 17, 2018
David Sullivan’s “Paper
Mache Peaches of Heaven”
035 October 23, 2018
Timothy Gager’s
“Sobriety”
036 October 30, 2018
Gary Glauber’s “The
Second Breakfast”
037 November 04, 2018
Heather Forbes-McKeon’s
“Melania’s Deaf Tone Jacket”
038 November 11, 2018
Andrena Zawinski’s
“Women of the Fields”
039 November 00, 2018
Gordon Hilger’s “Poe”
040 November 16, 2018
Rita Quillen’s “My
Children Question Me About Poetry” and “Deathbed Dreams”
041 November 20, 2018
Jonathan Kevin Rice’s
“Dog Sitting”
042 November 22, 2018
Haroldo Barbosa Filho’s
“Mountain”
043 November 27, 2018
Megan Merchant’s “Grief
Flowers”
044 November 30, 2018
Jonathan P Taylor’s “This poem is too neat”
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2018/11/44-backstory-of
poem-poem-is-too-neat.html
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2018/11/44-backstory-of
poem-poem-is-too-neat.html
