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September
"Poetry is one of the oldest, most widespread and yet most secret means of renewal known to human culture. It is the most essential way of prizing single words and the immemorial heritage that is language. With poetry, science and magic are mixed; we put runes under a microscope. A poem is a fish that has swallowed a ring of many meanings, leaping from the belly of a lake to flash for an instant in the sun.
"In recent years, I have found myself drawn to the Japanese tanka form, and have developed my own version of it, in English, through practice rather than theory. I say 'my own version' not as a boast, but as a disclaimer; as a disclaimer and not as an apology. I would say I 'attempted' to develop my own version, except that, in being something worked out in the doing, it has been entirely natural to me. The new form combines a discovery of small mental and emotional specimens, like shells on the mind's shoreline, with a stylistic means of presenting such natural and serendipitous finds as aphorism, memento, meditation and so on.
"In 2015, I decided that for the month of September, I would write, upon waking, at least one such poem a day. In this way I have attempted to keep a diary of time, place, mind and their relations to each other."
Quentin S. Crisp, Bexleyheath, February, 2016
"In recent years, I have found myself drawn to the Japanese tanka form, and have developed my own version of it, in English, through practice rather than theory. I say 'my own version' not as a boast, but as a disclaimer; as a disclaimer and not as an apology. I would say I 'attempted' to develop my own version, except that, in being something worked out in the doing, it has been entirely natural to me. The new form combines a discovery of small mental and emotional specimens, like shells on the mind's shoreline, with a stylistic means of presenting such natural and serendipitous finds as aphorism, memento, meditation and so on.
"In 2015, I decided that for the month of September, I would write, upon waking, at least one such poem a day. In this way I have attempted to keep a diary of time, place, mind and their relations to each other."
Quentin S. Crisp, Bexleyheath, February, 2016
- GenresPoetry
46 pages, Paperback
First published May 8, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 29, 2016
Quentin S. Crisp wrote at least one tanka (an ancient Japanese poetic form, a five line stanza with a syllable count of 5-7-5-7-7) each morning in September 2015. The result is a diary of glimpsed impressions and philosophical aphorisms, casting brief illumination like the 'komorebi' image in Japanese poems (translation: 'sunlight through branches' - to which Crisp adds 'through net curtains' on his poem for 11/9/2015).
Crisp makes the form his own; the stanzas are separate but interlinked, with motifs and themes returning reconsidered throughout the collection. Overall there's a feeling of progression and transformation despite these repetitions. It's as if Quentin's asking if there's a point to all this, and finding the answer within the fact that he's asking the question at all. So thoughts of death and futility create a self-deprecating humour, grumpy rants about the slogans used to silence debate become wider questions on the idea of meaning, and details of overheard conversations, glimpsed vistas, and remembered songs and books are knitted together into a celebration of the meaningfulness of it all:
There are so many
Things I want to do with you.
Buy a takeaway
From the Fortune Star on the
Erith Road. So many things.
Crisp makes the form his own; the stanzas are separate but interlinked, with motifs and themes returning reconsidered throughout the collection. Overall there's a feeling of progression and transformation despite these repetitions. It's as if Quentin's asking if there's a point to all this, and finding the answer within the fact that he's asking the question at all. So thoughts of death and futility create a self-deprecating humour, grumpy rants about the slogans used to silence debate become wider questions on the idea of meaning, and details of overheard conversations, glimpsed vistas, and remembered songs and books are knitted together into a celebration of the meaningfulness of it all:
There are so many
Things I want to do with you.
Buy a takeaway
From the Fortune Star on the
Erith Road. So many things.
Want to read
June 6, 2017This chapbook is Snuggly Slim no. 3 .
The book contains poetry by Quentin S. Crisp.
The book contains poetry by Quentin S. Crisp.
November 29, 2018
Rattling at the door
Portended a neighbour. Instead,
“Sorry, Yvann; I’m
Not in the mood for you.” But
Am I in the mood for this?
Quentin S Crisp’s September, unexpectedly not prose but a slim booklet of tanka, up to eight for each day of the month. Is there a poetic tone? There’s a tone, a personal one, perhaps tuned to poetry by the restriction of the form.
I don’t think I am.
He can’t pinpoint memories, because he didn’t make a record of their context, grandiosely saying they’ve flown the law of history when his omission opened the cage. He then attaches them to what he denies they were attached to, a conceit. He imputes nervousness at what the day will demand of him to car noises, pathetic fallacy. I’m not going through another twenty-nine days like this!
This isn’t analysis
Of his verse, precious
Yoking of ox with goldfish,
But précis of its content!
By the indirection of writing can he find life’s direction out? Or shouldn’t he just live it? How? Is there a choice? Maybe for him. Writing is a distancing lens on other than himself. Without it wouldn’t he be distanced anyway by his life in an impinging world? Most like, except it’s not a real choice. Ah, but he does like the little purposes life imposes and wishes it were made of errands like finding a good dry-cleaner’s. Don’t we all? And this is a surprise: carpe diem – from him! As he puts it, since the end of the world ends more than what we know, let’s just enjoy it. He doesn’t have to walk through London’s concrete heart to get a waft of marijuana; passing Caleeb’s door does that. I like that he woke from his anxious dream he’d crashed George’s boat to remember he had. There’s a lot to like. He really doesn’t like duty, meeting deadlines and obligations, the claims others justly make on him; he admits to indebtedness. He moans he’s like Celtic Frost – Who’s Celtic Frost? – largely unknown, bought and read by a morbid few, the coterie (and by me, obviously). He gives himself to breakfast to overcome the weight of eternity, death and guilt. Jesus! with whom he’s being not a little competitive. Fortunately I have no truck with any of that. Does he mean ‘cawed that old acred rattle’ or ‘acrid’? Could that slow pace of his be right? he asks. I don’t know. All I know is from the good rejection of his novel the critical approbation of ‘slow’ struck me like a three d blow. Did he really spell ‘draught’ like an American? Aquinas had to conclude there must be a prime mover since that was the premise he started from. By what criterion can he say he’s real? Interesting he should say the joy in him was murdered when he was small. I’d never have let anyone murder the joy in me when I was small. His sense of a writer’s rôle is as a bridge or border between one thing and another where their attributes mix.
You can read September of a morning between porridge and prune juice and don’t have to expend an evening writing about it should Yvann come to your door and you in the mood for him and not use of him for an introductory tanka to your review.
Portended a neighbour. Instead,
“Sorry, Yvann; I’m
Not in the mood for you.” But
Am I in the mood for this?
Quentin S Crisp’s September, unexpectedly not prose but a slim booklet of tanka, up to eight for each day of the month. Is there a poetic tone? There’s a tone, a personal one, perhaps tuned to poetry by the restriction of the form.
I don’t think I am.
He can’t pinpoint memories, because he didn’t make a record of their context, grandiosely saying they’ve flown the law of history when his omission opened the cage. He then attaches them to what he denies they were attached to, a conceit. He imputes nervousness at what the day will demand of him to car noises, pathetic fallacy. I’m not going through another twenty-nine days like this!
This isn’t analysis
Of his verse, precious
Yoking of ox with goldfish,
But précis of its content!
By the indirection of writing can he find life’s direction out? Or shouldn’t he just live it? How? Is there a choice? Maybe for him. Writing is a distancing lens on other than himself. Without it wouldn’t he be distanced anyway by his life in an impinging world? Most like, except it’s not a real choice. Ah, but he does like the little purposes life imposes and wishes it were made of errands like finding a good dry-cleaner’s. Don’t we all? And this is a surprise: carpe diem – from him! As he puts it, since the end of the world ends more than what we know, let’s just enjoy it. He doesn’t have to walk through London’s concrete heart to get a waft of marijuana; passing Caleeb’s door does that. I like that he woke from his anxious dream he’d crashed George’s boat to remember he had. There’s a lot to like. He really doesn’t like duty, meeting deadlines and obligations, the claims others justly make on him; he admits to indebtedness. He moans he’s like Celtic Frost – Who’s Celtic Frost? – largely unknown, bought and read by a morbid few, the coterie (and by me, obviously). He gives himself to breakfast to overcome the weight of eternity, death and guilt. Jesus! with whom he’s being not a little competitive. Fortunately I have no truck with any of that. Does he mean ‘cawed that old acred rattle’ or ‘acrid’? Could that slow pace of his be right? he asks. I don’t know. All I know is from the good rejection of his novel the critical approbation of ‘slow’ struck me like a three d blow. Did he really spell ‘draught’ like an American? Aquinas had to conclude there must be a prime mover since that was the premise he started from. By what criterion can he say he’s real? Interesting he should say the joy in him was murdered when he was small. I’d never have let anyone murder the joy in me when I was small. His sense of a writer’s rôle is as a bridge or border between one thing and another where their attributes mix.
You can read September of a morning between porridge and prune juice and don’t have to expend an evening writing about it should Yvann come to your door and you in the mood for him and not use of him for an introductory tanka to your review.
January 25, 2021
nullimmortalis June 2, 2016 at 1:52 pm Edit
I have just realised that the dates of this book’s September do not match the days’ names themselves for September 2016 when I had set myself the pleasurable or anguished task of reading and reviewing this diary poem in a real-time day by day process. So I started reading it today and couldn’t put it down.
In one fell sitting. The poem flows sweetly in enjambement about some less sweet existential and writerly and personal matters in South-Eastish London, but sweet, too. I had honest pangs that I was tapping this book, to extend my life, perhaps forever. You heard it here first. My dreamcatching reviews are a sort of vampiric supping of synchronicities and serendipities, the shards of random truth and fiction, untying the Ligottian knot, and this book has fed me more years than many others that I have similarly dreamcaught. It is life seen through tea-stained net curtains. It is this. It is that. It is easy to digest, but will I find it eventually difficult to expel? Death, too. And I hope the author or publisher does not mind me quoting one whole stanza out of many stanzas…
“Literature’s function
Is twofold. First to keep from
Dying. Second, to
Learn to die. Whatever I
Write, I won’t keep from dying.”
But that last bit does not apply to whatever I READ, I’d suggest, having now seen a sudden Erithian gap in the curtain.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews