HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MAESTRO

(BASTARDS, BANNED LISTS, BYZANTIUM)

Hello world, today would be The Great Roddy Lumsden’s 60th birthday. I wish he was here. I wish there was a party, to which I may or may not have been invited, and that - let’s be honest - I would avoid attending if I had been as if my very life depended on it. I don’t wish it for me, though, I wish it for Roddy. Roddy, unaccountably, loved that shit. I took great courage and comfort from that, mind. Roddy in the world. Somebody else who didn’t quite fit, holding his space, making it work. I miss him: his example as poet, a teacher, an editor. I miss, with a kind of disorienting solastalgia, the books he would’ve written. But mostly, I just miss my companionably awkward friend.

Each year, nearest his birthday, I hold a Roddy celebration session for my Masterclass cohort. I set a prompt based on his infamous “banned list”:

shard / daffodil / ziggurat / epiphany / fester / blob / palimpsest / soul / plethora / gossamer / ammonite / hark / destiny / rectal / candyfloss / sunset / frond / prayer / milt / sapient / tesserae / loo /snedder / poised / shriek / lambent / snot / Jesus / humdinger / shimmer / golden / heartbreak / mango / beautiful / harbinger / myriad

And we inevitably read this banger:

The Young

You bastards! It’s all sherbet, and folly
makes you laugh like mules. Chances
dance off your wrists, each day ready,

sprites in your bones and spite not yet
swollen, not yet set. You gather handful
after miracle handful, seeing straight,

reaching the lighthouse in record time,
pockets brim with scimitar things. Now
is not a pinpoint but a sprawling realm.

Bewilderment and thrill are whip-quick
twins, carried on your backs, each vow
new to touch and each mistake a broken

biscuit. I was you. Sea robber boarding
the won galleon. Roaring trees. Machines
without levers, easy in bowel and lung.

One cartwheel over the quicksand curve
of Tuesday to Tuesday and you’re gone,
summering, a ship on the farthest wave.

The “Banned List” (ominous caps) is a list of words that Roddy, as an editor, never wanted to see in poem ever, and could not bring himself to use as a poet. Some of them I find absolutely hilarious. For example ‘milt’ (fish semen) and ‘snedder’ (to strip leaves and branches from a fallen tree or root vegetable). I mean, how often would those even have come up? In what context were you encountering these enough that you developed strong opinions!?! Others, I can see a logic: they’re a little over-used and overwrought, with a quality of reaching after gravitas and beauty that isn’t always earned or native to the rest of the poem. Some of these words, though, just seem like serviceable descriptors to me.

The exercise I set with my class is to generate and share our own banned lists, which are then consolidated and transfigured in the form of homework: writing a poem using as many of the words from the list as we can. The purpose of the exercise is to uncover something about our often unconscious preferences (limitations) and to work against those in really deliberate ways. This particular prompt is based on what I did (inflicted on everyone) when given the original list. I’ve tried to find that original poem, but it’s lost to the mists of time, so I wrote another one (at the end of this post).

For now, though, I thought I’d share some of my notes about ‘The Young’ because it really is a stellar poem, and I would like to tell you all about it:

Okay, stanza one: you can agree, I think, this this is a bold opening salvo. Direct address creates a sense of intimacy, and also coterie. The ‘bastards’ in question are simultaneously Lumsden’s particular friends, students or social cohort (so the line is affectionately over-the-top), and the imagined readership of a long posterity. As if he’s imagining the poem into a future where everyone is young compared to its author. Its “you” is both particular and general, extra-temporal in that special poemy way.

Next: love that folly – foolishness – makes the addressees laugh like mules – which are also inherently foolish – so you end up with foolishness squared. Mules are also notoriously stubborn, which suggests a performative quality to this foolishness, a kind of bravado... There’s also maybe a slight nod towards masturbation (which for the longest time I refused to see) with “chances” dancing off the wrist. This can be read as a symbol of biological and psychic “waste”, of spending the precious substance of youth and life on frivolous things and in careless ways. But it can also be seen more positively as the young still being full of sap and generative energy. One writes with one’s wrists too, obvs.

I love the sherbt. And we might wonder why ‘sherbet’ in particular? Why not any sugary sweet? Is it the cheapness, the kind of sparkly granular quality, the way it blows away like powder, as well as its general zinginess? Is this also a nod to something less childlike? To drug taking? Cocain? How young are the young in question?

Sprites now – conjuring something enchanting/ enchanted, yet kind of illusory, and maybe not quite benevolent either for those who know their Irish and Scottish folkelore (!) Such a funny image, this: nimble, pixie-like, a little fey, perhaps.

We might also ask what we think about the spite being not yet swollen or set. like a sporting injury, right? Latent. Lumsden doesn’t say it isn’t there, mind. And because spriteliness, spite and straightness are linked across lines by their sonic properties, there’s a sense that there’s some kind of relationship between those things, which I find really interesting. Also this connection between the spectral/ fey and the earth-bound body. Youth is like a possession, poem as adorcism. Which brings me to ‘miracle’. This made me think of snake oil charlatans, tent revivals, peddlers of different kinds of gaudy yet attractive fiction. Yet what if the ‘miracle’ is sincere? More amazing if we’re being asked to buy into the magic, take it on its own terms.

Okay, and because the stanza isn’t end-stopped the connection between ‘miracle’ in that second stanza with ‘scimitar’ in the third is further emphasised. Why might this be? A scimitar is a curved sword, the kind of cutlass blade pirates might have. So miracles and piracy... Humm. Also, your pocket cannot be brimming literally with scimitar things. Which would be sharp and impractical and wouldn’t fit. A slightly brilliant student suggested this riffs on those Choose Your Own Adventure stories: the implausible things the protagonist is supposed to be carrying in their pocket. But moving on: ‘things’ is an important modifier here, items that resemble (but are not literally) scimitars, things that are swashbuckling and potentially dangerous, but also awkward, cumbersome, outlandish. There’s something about the improbability of the literalized image, though, that I’m tempted to take as half the point. Lumsden wants to create a sense of impossibility, of adventure. Grabbing a handful of scimitar isn’t a recommended activity, so might ‘miracle’ too be less than friendly?

I think the line ‘Now is not...’ says something about the special time of the poem, too, don’t you? How it’s simultaneously ‘now’ (something we’re inside of and experiencing) and in a world of its own. Suspended from the usual flow of time. Are the young, preserved within the poem, outside this flow of time too? Suspended here, forever young in the speaker’s memory? Is this a good thing, or not so much?

What do we think the difference is between ‘bewilderment’ and thrill’? I love that line, that teetering feeling of possibility, that scream half in pleasure, half in fear. Is ‘whip-quick’ necessarily a positive image? All the way through there are these little undercurrents of force, being spurred on by the whip, planked walked through your youth at the point of a sword. This is something else we can usefully ask ourselves, noting that there is actually quite a lot of violence in this poem. The violence is undercut with comic, almost bathetic moments. I adore the line/ stanza break that implodes its own seriousness in favour of “folly” with ‘broken/ biscuit’, for instance.

Also, can we just check in with ‘roaring trees’? And how disorientating is that on a scale of one to ten? I mean, they come suddenly crashing in to this otherwise watery scene? And ‘Machines’ (?) Which is weird, and implies an absence of volition or autonomy perhaps (?) What is the effect of conflating and combining the idea of machinery with that of nature at its most fundamental and personal? The idea of land and sea? This kind of formal gesture is the sort of thing that would usually merit a severe edit in a workshop situation. It’s the kind of out-there unselfconscious gesture that young poets are apt to make, but Lumsden does make it, and he’s drawing our attention to it deliberately. What’s more, those lines succeed, almost despite themselves. Catachresis ahoy!

The poem, then is partly about that unselfconscious confidence of young writers, poet’s ready to assume the risks of failure, even if only because they don’t know what those are. And Lumsden, the experienced editor, the elder statesman and teacher finds much to love in these gestures, wants to give them a place, to shelter and celebrate them within the poem.

Then we’re back at piracy again. If the young are robbers, what is it they are robbing and from whom? Is it a poem in fact about youthful powers in ascendency, about poetic influence flourishing in young protegees who seem set to inherit the stage that their teacher has just exited? Maybe. There is a little ghosting of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ by Yeats here: ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick. …’ etc., which also considers the contrast between youth and age in terms of a seafaring journey.

Except... as a meditation on ageing, and on the loss of opportunity, vital energy and power, the poem is remarkably lacking in judgement or regret. Rather, there’s great humour and fondness here. Yes, there is danger and cruelty, but it resides in the world (the spite, the quicksand, the scimitars, the whips) not necessarily in the young themselves. What the young lack, is perhaps nothing so much as a sense of perspective. I wonder if this poem isn’t a criticism at all, but an accounting for how opportunity only arises at the very point in life when we are least equipped to take advantage of it. It’s an anxious and hopeful watching as the next generation sallies forth.

+
And now a horrible “Banned List” poem of my own devising. Over long for old time’s sake. Happy birthday, Maestro:

aught

is anything and zero. we should
have known, how grief succeeds
misrule. we did. and yet, we so
enjoyed convenience, we built
ourselves a cheesy peace from
neat, bilingual helvetica lines. o,
those were vague and fragrant
days, our long goose summer
of the soul. read easton ellis,
foster wallace, coupland, bros:
sloe-eyed grifters, swollen-
headed, golden babygods. we
ate eclairs and public apology;
lip-synced to myriad teeny
prayers of normie angst. in
our bellies, little butterflies
of permanent grievance. we
shrugged our shoulders. we
puckered up. we chucked
our keys into the communal
bowl. those were the days.
of blue candyfloss and over-
confidence. waspish. our
waspy monostich. every
place we went, our floozy
curtsies flourishing. boudoir
cute. our curt snub and mic
drop, the limelight leaking
out from under our night-
gowns. all our boulevards
were wide and sunset pink.
we couldn’t see to drink
through tiny paper parasols.
between sojourn and exceed
we gave ourselves away.
we didn’t mind. we said
we didn’t mind. we were
negligee and tenebrous
pretension; the thorn inside
adore. backlit noir personae:
beautiful. harbingers of hard-
on. yes, even heartbreak was
bracing. we bent a form
and called it poise. we
troped a pose and called it
fabulous darling. anything
can be itemised. and it
usually will be: our rude
stupefaction in a fluted
glass; the grim shimmer
at the bottom of a cistern.
was it dark outside? was
it getting dark? and how
would we know? we liked
our epiphanies how we
liked our airport paper-
backs: flimsy. and torrid.
how late is too late? if war
moved round us, it was
not with rage – it was not
raging – but with a kind
of drowsy enterprise. war
s’more. even the ziggurat’s
segue of flame looked
cheap and internecine.
president dog-end-of-
dynasty, out of his
pram and trampling
the daffodils. we called
conceit optimism. we
practised an irritable
glamour, détournement,
metaphor. we cut crusts
from triangles of white
bread. we said we didn’t
mind. when we did, we
were extravagant sulk
and lambent tantrum.
the world grew pricks,
grew prickly and litigious.
we thought all pain
would melt away, milt-
sticky; that we could
spit the fishy stink of it
up. out. but no. and now
we’re here: condolences
and ordure; somebody
else’s child wiping
its snot on our sleeve.
we let destiny fester
under the house. that’s
not sapient, that’s
seepage. retreat!
back into the sanctified
mind palace:
decommissioned strip
mall, mouldy love
hotel. here to pick shards
of chandelier from bee-
hive hairdos. the mirror’s
pastiche empiricism,
memory’s chintzy
plethora; the face
breaks into blobs
and daubs. we should
have known. thought
we could live forever,
now we’re crying in
some beautifully
curated loo, sneddering
ourselves to death
with razors, lazars,
tweezers. ozempic.
it was everything
and zilch. we saved
what we could:
ourselves. the baby
jesus, painted on
a decorative orthodox
egg; a bunch of lego
heads, their yellow
cartoon tesserae,
like teeth. o, this
crummy book
of poems, hark!
its dessicated jest,
its cloudy fondant,
its mouse turds on
royal icing. kitty, i’m
scared. we can’t mini-
skirt and mango smoothie
our way out of this one.
it’s the head-banger’s ball –
the revenge of death metal
– and everyone’s invited.
a word in your shell like
ear now, whispering right
into the ammonite of your
hangover, curled in the
head, fossilised there
and passing for thought.
that was a real humdinger
of an annus horribilis,
wasn’t it? yeah, a full-
colour two-page spread,
nudes in glossy palimpsest.
what’s left? endoscopy,
rectal prolapse, house-
coats. brave new world
we’re pushing into, dora
the explorer-esque,
peering through the soot
and fronds.