The Four Stages of Being a Poet..

1. First – Lyric Innocence (where the Word and its Object are perfectly interchangeable)

2. When the Poet realises that “Words continually Fail”

3. The Dead Zone – (midlife) – as he inspects the Beautiful facade of the Cottage of Poetry..(except the front door has just quietly closed behind him as he inspects the neat little garden).

“a tiny fane to a banished god”

4. (many years later) Returning to the Backdoor of the Cottage he surprisingly discovers that it has been left off the latch – he re-enters and resolves never to leave home again, only Peking from time to time thru the curtains.

*Thanks to Don Paterson – “The Book of Shadows” Page 83-84*

thanx.

remora

In a past life, I was a student archaeologist in Wales for a couple of summers. I don’t drink beer (bad Montrealer) or wine (horrible Parisienne) and never got into the drink-for-drink’s-sake scene (sane, mature McGill student).

So, there I was, minding my own business in Wales when, being the socializer that I am, a tiny few of us trot down to the pub and I’m introduced to ‘the rounds’ system of you-buy-a-round-for-the-table-then-he-buys-a-round-then-I-buy-a-round-then… .

Fine. Three of us at a table, they’re having beer, I’m ending up with sweet shots of something 40%-ish with coke or squish (squash?)or some fruit syrup stuff like Ribena. I’m tipsy… but OK. And I don’t mind payin’ ’cause I think my concoctions were more expensive than the beer and they were paying.

Except, being the sociable person I am, and Wales being wet a lot and the tent being a $20 crap thing from a store chain known more for tires than camping equipment so the pub was the only warm, dry place we’d have almost every night, at the end of the week we were now at least eight people at the table (inlcuding locals who’d sing to me in Welsh… at least, I think it was Welsh. Maybe.).

Which means, while sitting on the plane home, that I calculated that I must have been drunk every night (except on our day off when I vowed to get the hell out of our field tents and stay at a b&b in Shrewsbury) from Day 3 to… um… morning of my flight weeks and months later.

However, I apparently was a happy, witty social drunk who never ever had a hang-over and could manage quite daintily to get back to camp in the pitch black of an 11PM Welsh evening without falling face-first into cow crap, trenches or roadside drainage ditches (unlike some who ended up with a doctorate from the University of Montana and you *know* who you are and I won’t let you forget that night since I still have the memories and the scars from dragging you out of a bramble bush after you slow-motioned slid off the roadside without a sound or sense in your head).

I was generally loathed by everyone in the morning since I was also, invariably, the first up and rearing to go dig/swamp out some more of our lovely area – after getting the cream from the top of the milk bottles for my morning tea, of course.

But I’ve never been any of those stages worthy enough for a knicknack bric-a-brac thing.

Sad.

One can never write poetry without drinking for drink’s sake. They go hand in hand.

By the way, I met Dylan Thomas in a San Francisco bar once.

Well, not really. But he was an old, toothless drunk poet – and quite worth buying beers for.