Composing a 'Temporary Poem'

Though the remotest sources of a poem are buried in personal history and forgotten reading, even when a piece is not directly, or not only, autobiographical, it nevertheless seems to begin for me in an event of life. Things as I find them: that would be a way of characterizing my subject matter, and poetic technique is a necessarily unsettled, but still embracing, process of discovering how to take things. It is perhaps worth saying before I begin that what follows should not be thought of as an account of reading, an interpretation, or an evaluation of the poem discussed. Rather, it is a description of some of the more formulable operating principles or notions about words and feelings that went into the making of the poem. This is simply to state my general belief that while a writer's intentions are not necessarily or exclusively the meaning of the piece he writes, he could never write it without them. I hope some of the pleasing shocks and surprises that occur in and around and beyond intention, which make writing poetry an exciting and illuminating business for me, are also to be sensed in what follows.

For the last eighteen months or so I have earned a living by taking part-time or temporary jobs: supervising Cambridge students, teaching English as a foreign language, proof-reading, copy-editing, and most recently - beginning in February 1981 - I have worked as a temporary lecturer in English Literature at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. But before I came here I attempted some drafts of two sequences of poems. One was to be called 'English as a Foreign Language', the other 'Temporary Poems'. The title of the second sequence is adopted from one of the famously quirky entries in Dr. Johnson's Dictionary:

GRU'BSTREET. n.s. Originally the name of a street near Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called grubstreet.

Though some possible applications of the word 'temporary' were beginning to form, the material I was attempting to shape was thin and flimsy: the drafts collapsed. Coming to Aberystwyth I still had it in mind, and when a conversation with a fellow lecturer, also on a short term contract, about the person he was replacing, happened to present itself, I wrote a poem from it quickly: a first draft was completed on the 16th March, the poem being in more or less its finished state a week later:

TEMPORARY POEM

Loud breakers expend their force
against the promenade;
they suck back, hurl pebbles
at protective shutters
of each hotel windows, frontdoors
long since fastened for the night.
But to mention the department's troubles
- that locked office of a man
with some incurable disease -
'He's not coming back,' you had said,
and for company. 'I wish he would
push off,' his fill-in uttered, at the sea's
distracting foam columns,
'Then I might know where I stood.'

Past half one, late, somebody else
leant against the sea wall's
stone parapet: caught by the long
withdrawn rattle, their eyes
dwelling on quick spray
which rose at irregular intervals,
punctuated talk. 'I realize
my callousness,' at length he said,
'his death near certain, interminable,
still, my own future to watch.'
'It is a pain,' you had to say,
as, from the shelter of a lit porch,
we separated into darkness
and the pattering rain.

Returning to Aberystwyth after the Easter Vacation, I was told by the professor here that the man had died. The dead man's room is next door to mine, and walking to work a day or so later a few first lines to a sequel formed in my head:

The temporary gravestone of his office door
offering no consolation
of remembrance,
will soon enough flake his name
when the post is filled or cut, like any tomb
mildewed, split by damp and cold.

The evening before I had been out for a walk along the front and had experienced a small but distinct sensation, like a sudden consciousness of being finitely in one place, as I looked at the King's Hall clock; when I wrote the above lines into a notebook I added in some others that were a re-formulation of passages from the failed drafts I had written before coming to Aberystwyth:

It's said that he died peacefully at home here
I'm mindful of, looking to the hands
of the shocking pink dance hall's clock
for the time of day, but reassurance
not forthcoming, this the sea-front cannot give.

Nor shall I be here long.

Through cherry blossom, pungent shoots
the distances intact

At this point the draft petered out; I thought I was writing a poem about the precarious but vivid sense of being alive that sometimes occurs when its opposite is suddenly present. The lines which followed the opening image of the door - which I had been given whole - seemed less satisfactory. The line: 'It's said that he died peacefully at home here' was derived from an official note on the department's board. I thought there was something in that: but while my own sense of being less than 'at home' was suggested by the clock image, the relationship between 'the time of day' and 'reassurance' was not clear. I liked the last clause because of its sudden confidence and buoyancy of rhythm: 'this the sea-front cannot give', and similarly the separate line 'Nor shall I be here long' - because its ambiguity of reference (defining my short term contract, cheering me up when I felt stuck in a small town away from my wife and friends, and alluding to my own death) was both chastening and releasing.

The next stage in the composition of the piece was to make seven drafts, all of which (in retrospect) show mistaken attempts to develop the poem's germ in the direction of my sea-front sensation. Here is the longest:

The temporary gravestone of his office door
still offers proof he existed,
soon enough will flake his name
when the post is filled or cut, like any tomb.
That he died peacefully at home here
I'm mindful of, now looking to the hands
of the shocking pink dance hall's clock
for the time of day - not that reassurance
is forthcoming - this, the sea-front cannot give.
Nor will I be here long.
A luminous dusk In early spring,
remarking on the loudness of the birds,
I make repeated journeys, examples of words
that have sha
now
when the post is frozen, split like any tomb.

The wastage is natural, he dying young.

Through a luminous early dusk in spring,
remarking on the loudness of the birds
I take the air, examples of words
that have made and feed me.
Wastage is natural, he dying young.
Nor will I be here long.

is forthcoming - this, the sea-front cannot give.
The wastage is natural, he dying young.
Through a luminous early dusk in spring,
remarking on the loudness of the birds
I take the air, examples of words
that have made and feed me.
Nor will I be here long.
Retiring early to the coast, the pensioners
shelter from the winds that blow
beyond the bitter end of the promenade,
the monumental mason's yard
or praise, blame, or reward.

Looking over this draft I can see various things happening. The opening image is developing in two ways. First of all, the sense that the named door might be preserved in the department because it reassures his colleagues that he is 'gone but not forgotten' is introduced, mainly suggested by the sound relations of 'office' - 'offers proof' - 'soon enough'. Then, where the first attempt breaks off at 'now', the technical word 'frozen' is introduced instead of 'filled or cut', and this term which has weather associations, 'the economic climate', could then pick up the image of the tombstone 'split by damp and cold' from the first draft.

This condensation of the image was drawn more or less directly from life. I had been to a department meeting where the future of this vacant post was discussed in the light of the impending University Grants Committee cuts. One of the senior members of the department spoke with dark humour of 'corpses hanging from frozen posts'. The discussion of department 'slimming' also produced the line: 'The wastage is natural, he dying young'. This line I liked. It gave to that piece of economic-forward-planning jargon 'natural wastage' a hollow veracity. The officialese 'wastage' pushing to one side the real 'waste' of a man dead in his prime (33 years old), the 'natural' catching up a sense of 'death from natural causes' - and how hard it is to take this truth, that death from a terminal cancer is a natural death: made more difficult by the opportunity thus offered to cut the size of the department in this 'painless' way if necessary - painless for the living. I also liked the line because it has a slightly jarring rhyme with that other promising line: 'Nor will I be here long'. In the rest of the draft I was introducing fragments of the early failed drafts to try and find a full shape for the poem. The lines beginning 'Through a luminous early dusk in spring' and the few lines running down to 'the monumental mason's yard / or praise, blame, or reward' are ones that have been floating through notebooks for up to a year. Sometimes, as I hope will appear the case, the collaging together of parts of drafts can produce a kind of transformation whereby all the disparate elements take on new senses from their different company - enlivening each other by their mutual association.

This kind of secondary composition (unlike the somewhat unprompted appearance of lines and phrases in the head) has to be managed by trial and error. I decided that this draft was error, and cut back the version to what I thought sounded true:

The temporary gravestone of his office door
still offers proof he existed,
soon enough will flake his name
now the post in frozen, split like any tomb.
That he died peacefully at home here
I'm mindful of, when looking to the hands
of the shocking pink dance hall's clock
for the time of day - not that reassurance
is forthcoming - this, the sea-front cannot give.
Wastage is natural, he dying young.
Nor will I be here long.

But this didn't really sound true enough either. 'I'm mindful of' is too arch in tone; 'the shocking pink...clock' is crudely internally rhymed; 'the time of day' is bathetic; why should I expect the sea-front to reassure anyway?; and the couplet rhyme of 'young' and 'long' is too explicitly self-regarding - the lines needing to be separated. Equally, this version does not develop the opening image and situation so as to give the final lines a chance to resonate widely. At this point, I seemed to be back at square one. All I had was the opening image and a few promising lines. So I gave up, and, to keep myself employed, I redrafted some other pieces and sketched ideas for new poems.

One unfinished draft, 'Without Security' - a long description of Aberystwyth from Constitution Hill which included oblique references to the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, Simon Peter's denial of Christ, as well as some lines recording fear of the 'cuts' in department members, and a reworking of the familiar play on the word 'prospects' (views and futures) - proved to be a better source for the development of my aborted piece. I wasn't pleased with 'Without Security' either, so speculatively collaged the two pieces together like this:

WITHOUT SECURITY

'From some high station he looks down,
At sunset, on a populous town.'
Matthew Arnold

This spa resort has seen its day.
Little tempters of incoming spray
scampering up the shingle, I look down
on its remnant of pier
that juts into the murky air
rusting above a wave cut platform.

The temporary gravestone of his office door
which closes off an empty room,
though representing small consolation,
still offers proof he existed;
it will noon enough flake his name
now the post is frozen, split like any tomb.

'That the axe will fall is not in doubt,'
friends warn me, 'I'm just holding on.'
And with the homesickness of someone
at home now anywhere, our gazes fix
on the permanent caravan site settling
into the hillside then envy it.

And that he died peacefully at home here
I bear in mind as I look to the hands
of the shocking pink dance hall's clock
for the right time, still alive
to a general unease: not that reassurance
is forthcoming - this, the sea front cannot give.

The wastage is natural, he dying young.
No one could tempt me with the run-down prom:
for my self-surrender, any talents
facing redundancies, only warn
of small prospects from this elevation.
Nor will I be here long.

If this seemed more promising, it still had to large drawbacks. First, the transition from the first stanza to the second did not work, the second stanza not being prepared for and the description of the pier - in not being developed - rendered irrelevant. Secondly, the penultimate stanza was as bad as ever, for reasons already given.

In the development from this draft to the next, the poem in its final form started to take shape. By cutting the first stanza, the scenario of 'Without Security' and the vague purpose of the epigraph (from Matthew Arnold's poem 'Resignation') was removed. Thus, I was left with the original 'Temporary Poem 2', beginning 'The temporary gravestone ...'; by cutting the penultimate stanza and reshaping a little I was left with this:

The temporary-gravestone of his office door
which closes off an empty room,
though representing small consolation,
still offers proof he existed;
it will soon enough flake his name
as the post is frozen, split like any tomb.

'That the axe will fall is not in doubt,'
friends have warned me, 'I'm just holding on.'
And with the homesickness of someone
at home now anywhere, our gazes fix
on the permanent caravan site
settling into the hillside, envy it

and that he died peacefully at home here.
The wastage in natural, he dying young.
No one can tempt me with the run-down prom;
facing redundancies, only warn
of small prospects from this elevation.
Nor will I be here long.

At this point I suddenly felt that the shape of the poem was there; it developed with a poetic logic of image and situation from his death and the office door, to the frozen post and fear of cuts, through security and a settled life, being at home in a place or not, into temporariness in work and in human life. However, I still felt uncomfortable about a number of details. The second, third and fourth lines of the poem didn't really explain themselves - what were they really there for? There is a clumsiness in the echoing of 'died' by 'dying' in lines thirteen and fourteen. The line endings of 'warn' and 'elevation' in the sixteenth and seventeenth rang the right sort of discrepant note, but are preempted and confused by 'prom' - similar vowel sound, wrong consonant - in the line preceding. How can 'No one...only warn' in lines fifteen and sixteen? Also, I didn't think there was any useful purpose in the stanza form, which had been grafted on in collaging the two pieces together as a way of organizing the bits - a process which sometimes produces new hints and phrases merely from the need to produce, in this case, blocks of six. This is how the line 'which closes off an empty room' occurred - also suggested by the conventional (but in this case apt enough) rhyme of 'room' and 'tomb'.

The next two drafts, of which I'll quote the latter, were mainly concerned to sort out the problem of lines two, three, and four. This was attempted by developing the 'empty room' idea, associating it with Christ's sepulchre an the third day. Here, I boxed clever, and read each account of the event in the four Gospels - adopting the words 'he is not here' which occur in all four. Also, by dwelling on why his name hadn't been removed, I tried to explain to myself some of the motivations behind remembrance and consolation. This is what I ended up with, including a number of other small revisions to improve the rhythm of the longish lines or to solve some of the other problems mentioned above:

The temporary gravestone of his office door
offering small consolation,

closes off an empty room.
He in not here, and a proof he existed

no one removes yet, for being alive
colleagues are wanting him still to have lived.

It will soon enough flake his name
as the post is frozen, split like any tomb.

'That the axe must fall is not in doubt,'
friends have mentioned, 'I'm just holding on.'

And with the homesickness of someone
at home now anywhere, our gazes fix

on the borough's permanent caravan site
settling into the hillside, envy it -

and that he died peacefully at home here.
The wastage is natural, he dying young.

No one could tempt me with the run-down front.
Facing redundancies, they may only warn

of small prospects from this elevation.
Nor will I be here long.

It still sounds unsure; and a number of versions on separate sheets of paper in manuscript and then typescript followed to sort out remaining difficulties. These drafts were thrown away. But by comparing the version above with what is, at the moment, the final version some last problems may be looked at:

The temporary gravestone of his office door
which offers us that little consolation,

seals off an evacuated room.
He is not here: but as others are,

colleagues wanting him still to have lived,
no one's removed yet a sign he existed.

It will soon enough flake his name -
the post being frozen - split like any tomb.

'That the axe must fall is not in doubt,'
acquaintances confided, 'I'm just holding on.'

And with the homesickness of someone
as at home now as anywhere, brief gazes fix

on the borough's permanent caravan site
settling into the hillside. Envy it,

or that he faded peacefully at home here.
The wastage is natural, he dying young.

Nobody could tempt you with the run-down front.
Facing redundancies, they may only warn

of small prospects from this elevation;
nor will I be here long.

I changed 'small consolation' to 'that little consolation' because the latter better contains a doubt about the consoling power of memorials, but not so much of a doubt as to say that there is no consolation to be had. 'Seals off' for 'closes off',and 'evacuated' for 'empty' were put in to convey a sense of present absence, not just an emptiness but a vacuum - a strong, almost visible feeling of his not being there, such as the disciples might have had. 'Evacuated' also has the sense of 'withdrawn', as though death were a kind of 'Miracle of Dunkirk'. I put 'but as others are' instead of 'for being alive' because the line ending clashed with the reorganized next line: 'lived'; and 'proof' was replaced by 'sign' because it seemed truer. The fifth and sixth lines were reversed in the general effort to improve the relation of the syntax to the lineation - which in the penultimate version quoted above seemed crabbed.

'Acquaintances confided' for 'friends have mentioned' occurred because I thought the word 'mentioned' lame here, and alighting on 'confided', which has a faint note of confidences and corridor speculations, I couldn't put 'friends confided' because the noun is too much bespoken in the Latin root of confide - which I imagine to be 'fidus' as in 'fidus Achates', and related to 'fidelity'. The relation between noun and verb was too close for the sense of the situation; 'acquaintances confided' more accurately suggested being trusted with a personal view, perhaps a little too readily. 'At home now anywhere' was changed to 'as at home now as anywhere' again to improve the accuracy and consistency of the statement. If we are so uprooted as to be at home anywhere, why envy the permanent caravan site? I introduced 'brief' for 'our' in 'gazes fix' to indicate a note of temporariness, of an interest which is intense but transient. The echoing of 'died' by 'dying' in lines fifteen and sixteen was avoided by 'faded' which may suggest euphemism, aptly perhaps. I changed 'No one could tempt me' into 'Nobody could tempt you' to avoid the repetition of 'No one' from line six, a repetition which would make for a slightly obsessive, and unwanted recriminating reiteration, and 'me' became 'you' so as to reserve the first person viewpoint until the last line and to include other employees or even the dead man with myself. The semi-colon at the end of the penultimate line, replacing the full-stop, was employed to lessen the isolation of the last line - to make it more a clinching afterthought that 'chastens and releases', rather than the prepared punch-line that it might have become during the process of composition. The poem was begun during the last week of April and all but completed in its present form by 19th May 1981. Since then I have nearly finished a poem to follow it; and I live in hope of a few more yet.

(First published in theHertforde Poets Journal no. 20, 1981)