years, committed lines to napkins, pamphlets, museum maps, tickets for different transportation systems, flyers for clubs, restaurant menus, place mats, gum and mint wrappers, shop receipts, margins of newspapers, and whatever else contained a blank space, including the fronts and backs of his hands, the safest place of all apart from the time he forgot and washed his hands and lost a poem to the drain.
Perhaps owing to my ignorance, or to caution or discretion on his side, Daniel showed me mostly fragments. This was fine with me; I had trouble concentrating when something was read out loud so the shorter the piece, the less chance of drifting. On the back of a cinema ticket:
Mortal coughing in the antechamber
. On the pamphlet to the Imperial War Museum:
Life in limbo, a stalling of haikus
. On a napkin from a café in Soho:
Canary in cage/Biography
in microscript
. On a torn piece of paper:
Verbs locked away/The snow leopard’s winter hoard
. On another scrap:
Lame dragon December
, followed by two smudged lines.
Some poems had been inspired by things he’d overheard at the museum, words spoken by visitors walking past or standing at a painting nearby, and in some cases, or actually most, they were direct transcriptions of phrases misheard, for that’s how a new idea would pop into his head, he said, when he was there at his post, half present half absent, and phrases were being uttered around him. He could interpret them as he chose, and in many cases he jumbled them up, changed a word, replaced a letter or subtracted a line. He’d only started this methodology at Tate Britain, snatching things from the air and giving them shape with his pen. At the National Gallery there were too many visitors and too much noise and activity, so fewer chances to eavesdrop. I would often hear snippets of conversation as people entered and exited the rooms, like the details from paintings they sold on postcards in the shop, but my hearings and mishearings rarely led to anything new.
Daniel never asked for my opinion and I never offered one. Years ago I’d nearly killed our friendship by suggesting I didn’t like something and had kept quiet ever since. It made little difference how much I listened or let my thoughts stray. Along with the nautilus, I was simply another ear, and sometimes all he needed was to get the poem off the page and into the air in order to then send it out.
The afterlife of what he wrote depended, I knew, almost entirely on the reactions he received through the post. When a poet from Buenos Aires expressed in the most diplomatic terms possible his concern over Daniel’s new collection
The Singed Fur of the Circus Tiger
, suggesting it was maudlin at times, Daniel immediately shelved it. He omitted ‘at times’ from his memory and pulled the word ‘maudlin’ into relief. Yet if he’d asked me I would’ve said, Don’t shelve it, send it out. If he’d asked me I would have told him that I loved the poem about the old elephant that escaped a travelling circus, one of the few he’d read me complete, how after a life in chains and goaded by rods, four-ton Dora was startled by a cat and broke free and ran out into the highway where she collided with a bus. The driver died, Dora died, as well as six passengers, their wounds described in chilly detail. Daniel ended the poem with a description of the final spotlights to shine on the lifeless pachyderm, those of passing cars. But the poet from Buenos Aires wasn’t moved, not by Dora or any of the other unlucky animals featured in the collection, and maudlin was too weighty a verdict.
It was nearing eight by the time Daniel put away his various papers and remembered I was hungry. By then I was shifting in my seat every few minutes and looking out of the inky squares of the windows. The pot of tea and the bottle of wine had long sat empty. After consulting a few takeaway menus we ordered three Thai dishes, clutching at our chopsticks in the half-lit room,
Perhaps owing to my ignorance, or to caution or discretion on his side, Daniel showed me mostly fragments. This was fine with me; I had trouble concentrating when something was read out loud so the shorter the piece, the less chance of drifting. On the back of a cinema ticket:
Mortal coughing in the antechamber
. On the pamphlet to the Imperial War Museum:
Life in limbo, a stalling of haikus
. On a napkin from a café in Soho:
Canary in cage/Biography
in microscript
. On a torn piece of paper:
Verbs locked away/The snow leopard’s winter hoard
. On another scrap:
Lame dragon December
, followed by two smudged lines.
Some poems had been inspired by things he’d overheard at the museum, words spoken by visitors walking past or standing at a painting nearby, and in some cases, or actually most, they were direct transcriptions of phrases misheard, for that’s how a new idea would pop into his head, he said, when he was there at his post, half present half absent, and phrases were being uttered around him. He could interpret them as he chose, and in many cases he jumbled them up, changed a word, replaced a letter or subtracted a line. He’d only started this methodology at Tate Britain, snatching things from the air and giving them shape with his pen. At the National Gallery there were too many visitors and too much noise and activity, so fewer chances to eavesdrop. I would often hear snippets of conversation as people entered and exited the rooms, like the details from paintings they sold on postcards in the shop, but my hearings and mishearings rarely led to anything new.
Daniel never asked for my opinion and I never offered one. Years ago I’d nearly killed our friendship by suggesting I didn’t like something and had kept quiet ever since. It made little difference how much I listened or let my thoughts stray. Along with the nautilus, I was simply another ear, and sometimes all he needed was to get the poem off the page and into the air in order to then send it out.
The afterlife of what he wrote depended, I knew, almost entirely on the reactions he received through the post. When a poet from Buenos Aires expressed in the most diplomatic terms possible his concern over Daniel’s new collection
The Singed Fur of the Circus Tiger
, suggesting it was maudlin at times, Daniel immediately shelved it. He omitted ‘at times’ from his memory and pulled the word ‘maudlin’ into relief. Yet if he’d asked me I would’ve said, Don’t shelve it, send it out. If he’d asked me I would have told him that I loved the poem about the old elephant that escaped a travelling circus, one of the few he’d read me complete, how after a life in chains and goaded by rods, four-ton Dora was startled by a cat and broke free and ran out into the highway where she collided with a bus. The driver died, Dora died, as well as six passengers, their wounds described in chilly detail. Daniel ended the poem with a description of the final spotlights to shine on the lifeless pachyderm, those of passing cars. But the poet from Buenos Aires wasn’t moved, not by Dora or any of the other unlucky animals featured in the collection, and maudlin was too weighty a verdict.
It was nearing eight by the time Daniel put away his various papers and remembered I was hungry. By then I was shifting in my seat every few minutes and looking out of the inky squares of the windows. The pot of tea and the bottle of wine had long sat empty. After consulting a few takeaway menus we ordered three Thai dishes, clutching at our chopsticks in the half-lit room,
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