The Incomplete Tim Key. Tim Key
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Название: The Incomplete Tim Key

Автор: Tim Key

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Юмористические стихи

Серия:

isbn: 9780857861207

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СКАЧАТЬ dump in the ornate upstairs bog, but primarily I write. Unchallenged, without distractions. I am laying into my intros like a man possessed. I am getting the job done. I am transforming, updating, revolutionising the top and tail of my book. And I thank the advent of Airbnb and the dope they’ve hooked me up with for providing me with the perfect conditions in which to do it.

       INTRODUCTION

      Writing isn’t easy. People sometimes make the mistake of thinking it is. They make the mistake of thinking any old Tom, Dick or Harry can do it. They look at a book or a text message and they think: ‘I could do that.’ In actual fact they are wrong. Throw these twats a pen and a ream of paper and they’d go pale, a lot of them. Because writing is tough as hell.

      Being a writer is, if anything, a curse. Sometimes I’ll spend maybe half an hour, forty-five minutes staring at a blank sheet of paper, my Mitsubishi Uniball Pencil swinging gently above it, clueless as to what I should write. Sometimes, after maybe two hours, perhaps longer, I will rise from my seat and sling my cushion hard against the wall of my study. That’s what it can do to you. It can tear you right up. Then I’ll pick up my swivel chair and smash it down repeatedly on the step next to my French windows. I’ll shout as I do this. Each time I bring it down I’ll yell some kind of grubby obscenity. My hands will be bleeding by this point, like that little twerp from the movie Whiplash, but I won’t care, I’ll just keep smashing my damn chair down with great force until all I’m basically left with is the stem and the wheels. Then I’ll throw that against the French windows. If they smash, they smash. If they don’t, I’ll pick up the stem and the wheels and I’ll go again. If we’re still not making any inroads into the french windows, I’ll take a break. I’ll go and fix myself a coffee, calm down a bit, maybe have a dark chocolate biscuit or some Red Leicester. Then I’ll put on a gardening glove, come back into my study, pick up the stem and the wheels of my swivel chair again, take a huge breath, and then I will make sure it goes through those french windows by any means possible. And when it does I’ll collapse back onto my reindeer-skin rug and I’ll groan.

      Writing is hard. I know there are other jobs that are hard. You probably have one. You’re probably standing there in your fire-fighter’s kit right now, leafing through this with your huge heatproof gloves. A cup of coffee on the go, sucking up some verse in between the blazes. I have the utmost respect for your kind. I wouldn’t run into a burning house for all the tea in China. In fact, the merest whiff of smoke and I’m out, off running the other way. Stood in the street in my dressing gown, cheering you brave boys on from the sidelines. And it’s not just you. I could name ten jobs which are universally accepted as being harder than what I do for a living. Paramedic springs to mind. Top chefs constantly tell us about the stress they go through. ‘It’s not all about dunking our fingers in sauces and checking they’re salty enough,’ they say. Then there are things like teachers, trawlermen and florists. Farmers even like to get involved in the debate. The early mornings. The squeeze they feel from the supermarkets. The challenge of staying on top of personal hygiene. Everyone has it tough, I appreciate. But as tough as me? Mmm, that I doubt.

      To conjure words from the ether. To lay them down in the right order. To ensure they are original. That they make sense. The constant worry that what you are writing down might be gobbledygook. It’s a huge weight we bear on our shoulders. It’s a measure of how stressful our job is that a lot of us writers have a stress ball on our desk. I’ve had mine for years. I prod it when I’m looking for an adjective. In my darker times I have been known to squeeze it so hard that whatever gloop is contained within has dripped onto my parchment. When I have a deadline, I draw out my craft knife and I stab the stress ball with one hand whilst I type frantically with the other. Show me the equivalent of that sorry little tale within the fire-fighting world. In truth, you won’t be able to.

      Not that I am complaining. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I am happy to be a poet. I know that in spite of the difficulties, in spite of the bruises, the sorrow, if I was to jettison this life and set out on a different calling I would fall at the first hurdle. I wouldn’t last five minutes in a bakery, an aquarium, a war zone, a circus or any other workplace you care to throw into the hat. Because I am a poet. For all the horseshit that comes with it, that is the truth of it and something which I cannot, will not, deny. I am a poet, and a bloody important one. And I know I must plough on. And hope that at some stage it monetises.

       INTRODUCTION

      If you’ve ever put together an anthology of your poems, you’ll know that one of the main things that comes up in meetings and emails is this phrase: ‘Which poems will go into the anthology, anyway?’

      That was certainly my experience. From the outset there were long discussions as to which of my poems should go into this book. And, more sadly, which shouldn’t.

      I should clarify, nice and early, that the problem with me has never been that it is difficult to scratch together ‘enough’ poems. No, quite the reverse. When it comes to quantity, I have an embarrassment of riches. In fact, I’ve heard it argued that I do better for quantity than I do for quality. Who knows? May be a grain of truth in that. I think there’s a debate to be had, though. One thing that is beyond question is this: I’ve got over 2,000 of the sods. And in other news, I’ve never had any complaints about the quality of any of them.

      So where do you start? I remember at the first full English breakfast I had with Nick – the editor of the original hardback, way back in 2011 – he arrived armed with a wad of my poems. I remember him dealing them onto the table and saying words to the effect of ‘These: I like.’ I was piercing my fried egg with the corner of my fried bread at the time and barely concentrating on his activities, but that I do remember. These poems spread across the red and white chequered tablecloth, Nick prodding them with a teaspoon. One after another he would poke one and say, ‘This one: I like.’ I remember sipping my Fanta and thinking, ‘So what? Me too.’

      The hammer blow came a couple of minutes later when he finished his prodding. He shuffled the poems back up into a wad again and bunged them down next to my bowl of beans. There must have been about thirty of the bastards. ‘The question is,’ he said earnestly, ‘where are we getting the rest from?’ I remember nodding as I folded some bread and butter round a hash brown and spooned on some juice that had apparently sweated out of the mushrooms. I remember smiling, too, and leaning right across our plates, right into his face. ‘From the same Word document you printed these out from, matey,’ I said. And I slotted the hash into my mouth and I leant way back in my chair.

      He seemed like he wanted to be the next person to speak, but I held a sausage up to his mouth to shush him. ‘I’ll just choose the best three hundred,’ I continued. He started his next sentence with ‘But in terms of quality …’, but I shut him off; changed the subject to a discussion of where he thought the waiter was from. Nick was silent for a spell, but then adapted to our new topic, suggested maybe Scotland. And the question of ‘which poems’ remained in my court for the remainder of our relationship.

      When I got home I started to pore through my poems. It’s difficult to select three hundred poems when you have such an intimidating stack. I know it’s a cliché, but they are all my babies. I write them all. I know that sounds unbelievable when you consider the standard and wealth of them, but it’s true. Of course I’ve considered farming them out. Hiring some whizz kid PA to squat at my desk, rattling them off from dawn till dusk, but that’s just not how this game works. Ask any poet and they’ll tell you the same thing: it’s important you have a stake in all your poems. A feeling of ownership. So I write them. And I become very attached to them. And so to just cast a thousand, fifteen hundred, more to one side – well, it’s tough. But that was the task, and so I necked maybe a quart of gin and I started hurling clumps of my poems over my head. Huge fistfuls of the sods.

      It’s СКАЧАТЬ