When written?
Most of the poetry was written from 1973
to 1976, with
only occasional pieces written since. The short stories date from 1981
onwards, and the novels from 1990 to 1993. A sixth novel is
half-written, but because I have been concentrating on my music
composition work from 1995 I do not expect to return to it.
Overall distinguishing features of the literary works.
- The works are exploratory in various ways. Usually there is
an
underlying spiritual quest - away from the restrictions of religious
belief and towards realization of one's true, spiritual, nature.
- A strong satirical element: many aspects of 'normal'
everyday
life (including sexual mores, taboos and people's
blindness
to their own personal responsibility) are held up to the light, often
in entertaining and challenging ways, which will occasionally 'shock'
the uptight and the squeamish.
- A pervading sense of humour, which is at times described by
readers as 'black' or Monty-Pythonesque, which greatly eases the flow
and avoids heaviness in the darker and more serious parts.
- A degree of dream-like surrealism. Most of the works flow
rather
like dreams. There is always a logic about that flow, however, so that
the impossible easily becomes the simple everyday reality. However, the
works don't degenerate into unreadable 'modernist' gibberish.
- A structure and development based on symphonic music
compositional techniques rather than any particular literary tradition.
In many of the poems and most of the short stories and all of the
novels, ideas, images and even mere turns of phrase (the latter
especially in the poetry) are treated like melodic motifs in a complex
symphony. The sort of symphony I'm thinking of is like late Sibelius or
Holmboe, in which the structure of the work is more a process of
organic evolution and metamorphosis rather than the more traditional
'classical' structures. Particularly in the novels there are many
cross-connections of ideas and images, which can imbue what would
otherwise be trivial details with considerable power. The reader
doesn't have to know about all this, of course; the point is that this
approach to structure and internal cross-references means that each
work has a much greater and more profound effect than the simple sum of
the narrative elements, just as a good symphony is something far
greater than the sum of its tunes. In fact in many respects I regard my
5 completed novels as being my first 5 symphonies.
What are the works about?
I have always winced when asked this question. I do not regard
any
of my works, literary or musical, as being 'about' one thing or
another, because that is a very limiting view that excludes the
broader, multidimensional nature of what I communicate in my works.
They are about many, many things, and I know that underlying much of
what I write - in my literary writings as much as my music - are
powerful scenarios from previous lifetimes of mine. I have not been
aware of these at the time of writing, but they nonetheless show
through and direct the particular images and scenarios which emerge in
my works.
The Poetry
This was the field in which I developed
the
compositional techniques which later flourished in short stories,
novels and eventually symphonic music. The poetry has received both
bouquets and (sometimes heated) brickbats. Notable people who wrote to
me praising my work (when I was very amateurishly self-publishing my
poetry in the mid-1970s) were Sir John Betjeman, Brian Patten and the
late Danish composer Vagn Holmboe. Rightly or wrongly, some people have
gone as far as claiming that in some of my poetry (and indeed fiction)
I have invented an altogether new genre of literature.
Particular distinguishing features of the
poetry, in
addition to those noted above for all my literary works, are:
- Any resemblance to regular rhyming
verses is
rare, the rhythmic element certainly being present but usually having a
flowing, evolving character, like melodic elements in a symphony. Some
but by no means all people, however, have great difficulty picking up
the intended rhythm from certain of the works when they read them from
the printed page, but the rhythm becomes apparent to them when I read
them out.
- The echoing and often metamorphosis
of phrases or
sounds from line to line (not necessarily adjacent lines) is a commonly
used structural feature, which is more versatile and potentially more
powerful in effect than regular end-of-line rhyming. Again it is more
like what occurs with melodic elements in many symphonies.
- Sometimes considerable liberties are
taken with
the English language. Phrases are often telescoped into one another;
with various puns and multiple meanings and occasionally a feel of a
sort of pidgin English. Despite this, the works are not really of the
inaccessible 'modernistic' type.
- For the most part, these poems are
of
high-energy, high-profile character (a few could even be described as
volcanic), in marked contrast with the hushed and precious nature of so
much popular poetry. They are generally cosmic and universal rather
than intimate in their view, and were written not to please poets or
poetry groups, but to touch the hearts and souls of people
and play some part in opening new horizons of consciousness for them.
- The subject matter of certain of the
poems is
particularly strong, occasionally touching on matters about which some
people get very hot under the collar - especially as they expect poetry
to be more or less 'nice'. You have been warned! The purpose of
including occasional taboo subject matter here is compassion,
and therefore I am totally unrepentant about it. Complainants merely
demonstrate the very sort of inhuman unawareness that my work seeks to
counter.
- That there is often a slight
rough-edgedness in
the feel of my poetry doesn't necessarily have anything to do with lack
of craftsmanship. There are many poets who turn out marvellously
crafted pieces - much slicker than mine - but very often if you look
carefully at what they are communicating, the strongest part of their
message is 'look what a clever poet I am!', which
to me is
quite a turn-off and indeed in my view is a serious squandering of
their talent. With my 'organic' approach, I allow the potentialities of
the initial idea(s) to determine the form of each piece, rather than
any preconceived notion of what a poem should be like. There is thus
always a sense of treading dangerously, breaking out into the unknown
with directness and even urgency. In the same way, narrow minds have
compared the music of Beethoven or Sibelius unfavourably against that
of Haydn, Mozart and their various soundalikes, not understanding that
a more outward-looking and exploratory approach can produce tremendous
masterpieces despite and indeed sometimes partly because of the
apparent flaws that are inherent in that modus operandi.
